Photo by Waner Bros., Waner Bros.
Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre (left), Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach star in "Watchmen."
One hopes that the parents of young comic-book fans -- even those who subjected their toddlers to the grim chaos of "The Dark Knight" -- will take the R rating on "Watchmen" seriously.
Photo by Waner Bros.
Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre (left), Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach star in "Watchmen."
When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the outlawed, but no less determined, masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill ...
Rating: R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language
Length: 163 minutes
Released: March 6, 2009 Nationwide
Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Alex Tse, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
Yes, this is a superhero movie in which a costumed crimefighter known as the Nite Owl uses his cool flying Owlship to rescue civilians from a burning building; but it's also a film with scenes of jailhouse dismemberment, meat-cleaver murder, "lesbian whores," the assassination of John F. Kennedy and attempted rape. A pregnant woman is shot in the belly; a city is disintegrated; a blue giant bares all; Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as president. The world of "Watchmen" is not for the faint of heart.
Directed by Zack Snyder, whose previous film was an adaptation of a less
ambitious graphic novel, Frank Miller's "300," "Watchmen" -- based on the 23-year-old DC Comics work by writer Alan Moore and artists Dave Gibbons -- arrives onscreen after many years of aborted attempts and a much-publicized recent lawsuit between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. The script is credited to David Hayter ("X-Men") and newcomer Alex Tse; Moore, who now disdains adaptations of his work, is uncredited by own request, as he was on the movie version of his graphic novel "V for Vendetta."
"Watchmen" is set in 1985, in an alternate-history version of the world in which costumed crime fighters once were active but now are outlawed and Russia and the U.S. are on the brink of nuclear war. The filmmakers bring us up to speed with a lengthy opening-credits montage scored to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'"; the song choice is so obvious that one suspects it's supposed to be a wry comment on the use of clichéd songs in movies until Snyder begins a funeral scene just as unimaginatively, with Simon and Garfunkel singing: "Hello darkness, my old friend..."
The story (like the character of Dr. Manhattan) jumps around in time and place, from the 1940s to the 1980s and from New York to Vietnam and Mars to Antarctica. It begins as a whodunit, with a psychopathic masked vigilante known as Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) investigating the murder of an only slightly less disturbed former crime fighter known as the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
Rorschach's sleuthing brings him back into contact with such other former colleagues as Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre (Cameron Diaz soundalike Malin Akerman), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), "the smartest man in the world," and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a glowing blue former nuclear physicist with god-like powers and an apparent dislike for clothing. Various celebrities of the 1960s through the '80s appear as characters in cameos, including Henry Kissinger, Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca, newsman Ted Koppel and photographer Annie Leibovitz, played by actors in distracting prosthetic makeup.
Wilson is excellent as the insecure, earnest Nite Owl, but Haley -- in his first serious role since his Oscar-nominated comeback in "Little Children" -- steals every scene, even under a trench coat, a fedora and a mask patterned after the free-association ink blot tests used by psychiatrists. (The existence of patterns and thus meaning within seemingly random events is one of the graphic novel's themes.) Carla Gugino also impresses as the Silk Spectre's mother, a retired member of the first wave of costumed crime fighters.
Comic books and movies both tell stories with pictures, but "Watchmen" demonstrates that the animating spirit of a rich, fully realized graphic novel may be as hard to transfer to the screen as that of any other type of successful literary work. The movie is entertaining, even frequently exciting (Snyder seems more comfortable depicting combat than conversation -- the scene in which Nite Owl and Silk Spectre beat up an army of prisoners is thrilling), yet it embalms rather than energizes the material. The effort seems rather pointless -- not to mention simplistic -- compared to the "Watchmen" created by Moore and Gibbons. In 2009, the story's violence seems more trendy than shocking, the despair more fashionable than heartfelt. Hello, darkness, my old friend -- can you give light a message for us? Tell him we miss him.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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Comments » 1
vwbug521#552185 writes:
We saw it last night on my husband's birthday. Total waste of money.
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