Alternately titled: "In Which C. Fisher Provides an Unbiased Review of Watchmen Nonetheless from a Nerd's Point of View"
I have not read the Watchmen comic. Most of you know of this, and of my insistence not to read it before seeing the movie. I wanted to experience the film without bias or expectation, except those that I came by via word of mouth and conversation.
I know people have strong feelings about Watchmen, so I am going to do my best to COMPLETELY DISREGARD them and give my honest opinion.
Watchmen was a visually beautiful film ruined by clunky dialogue, an incoherent (by which I mean "un-cohesive," not "difficult to understand") plot, and a distracting overuse of popular music.
I'll start with the positive. Many of the shots, effects, and images of the film were truly beautiful and mesmerizing, especially near the beginning. Trying to parse meaning from the ever-shifting shapes on Rorschach's mask was one of the more mentally engaging parts of the film. Unlike a lot of people, apparently, I didn't find the opening credits particularly amazing, but the fight scene resulting in the Comedian's death was fantastic. As the film progressed, I will admit that I started to get bored of gore splatter, slow/fast punches, and bone-breaking. I did not get bored of looking at Patrick Wilson, but that is beside the point.
The plot was the weakest part of the film. I'm sorry, Alan Moore fans, but as I ranted and raved about in my V for Vendetta review a few years ago, his plots just can't be transferred directly into the film medium, they NEED to be reworked. I had some investment in the characters, some moreso than others, but no investment at all in the story. Someone killed the Comedian. Okay. He seemed kind of like a terrible person. There is going to be nuclear war? Hm. Okay. I guess for me, there were really no stakes. If you want to make an audience worried about a nuclear war, show some shots of normal people panicking, praying, weeping, building bunkers and holding their children close, not talk show hosts talking matter-of-factly about how the Doomsday Clock is at four minutes to midnight.
There wasn't much build-up to Dr. Manhattan's realization that he still had feelings. There wasn't much build-up to Nixon deciding to go to DEFCON 1. There wasn't much of a build-up to the climax at Ozymandias' secret South Pole fortress of solitude, either. These were prime opportunities for the film to get us invested, to make us excited, but it just kind of blandly laid events out. Choosing any one of these as THE BIG CLIMAX and working around them would have automatically made the film more engaging.
I think the strongest parts of the plot were the little backstory vignettes that composed the first half of the film. Each was its own little mini-movie and they were fairly effective. But all these great, complex characters were all set up only to essentially go through the superhero motions at the end. DISAPPOINTING.
I'm sure a lot of people have talked about the music, so I won't spend a lot of time on it, but I found it REALLY distracting. Did we really need that Simon & Garfunkle song at the funeral? Did we need "99 Luftballons" in the restaurant? Sometimes gaps without dialogue can stand on their own! I feel like the insertion of the songs there represented a huge lack of faith in the power of the visual narrative.
All in all, for a film that was supposed to run dark and deep, there were a lot of silly giggles in the theater when I saw it. Some at the almost comedically explicit violence, some at the sort of cliched lead-ins to the Silk Specter/Nite Owl sex scenes, some just at awkward dialogue. I think a lot of the laughter could have been avoided if (sorry Zack Snyder) it had been put in the hands of a more skillful director. Snyder is great with action scenes, but he cannot do drama for the life of him.
Any drama the film had was salvaged by the fantastic Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. I've only ever seen him (that I remember) in Little Children, but he was fantastic in that as well, obviously in a very different way. In Watchmen, a film where most other actors were kind of sadly smiling and shrugging their way through, he was absolutey in the zone.
In closing, I'm sure that this film works excellently as a supplement to the comic book, but it absolutely does not hold up as a standalone film.
WARNING: THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS
I have not read the Watchmen comic. Most of you know of this, and of my insistence not to read it before seeing the movie. I wanted to experience the film without bias or expectation, except those that I came by via word of mouth and conversation.
I know people have strong feelings about Watchmen, so I am going to do my best to COMPLETELY DISREGARD them and give my honest opinion.
Watchmen was a visually beautiful film ruined by clunky dialogue, an incoherent (by which I mean "un-cohesive," not "difficult to understand") plot, and a distracting overuse of popular music.
I'll start with the positive. Many of the shots, effects, and images of the film were truly beautiful and mesmerizing, especially near the beginning. Trying to parse meaning from the ever-shifting shapes on Rorschach's mask was one of the more mentally engaging parts of the film. Unlike a lot of people, apparently, I didn't find the opening credits particularly amazing, but the fight scene resulting in the Comedian's death was fantastic. As the film progressed, I will admit that I started to get bored of gore splatter, slow/fast punches, and bone-breaking. I did not get bored of looking at Patrick Wilson, but that is beside the point.
The plot was the weakest part of the film. I'm sorry, Alan Moore fans, but as I ranted and raved about in my V for Vendetta review a few years ago, his plots just can't be transferred directly into the film medium, they NEED to be reworked. I had some investment in the characters, some moreso than others, but no investment at all in the story. Someone killed the Comedian. Okay. He seemed kind of like a terrible person. There is going to be nuclear war? Hm. Okay. I guess for me, there were really no stakes. If you want to make an audience worried about a nuclear war, show some shots of normal people panicking, praying, weeping, building bunkers and holding their children close, not talk show hosts talking matter-of-factly about how the Doomsday Clock is at four minutes to midnight.
There wasn't much build-up to Dr. Manhattan's realization that he still had feelings. There wasn't much build-up to Nixon deciding to go to DEFCON 1. There wasn't much of a build-up to the climax at Ozymandias' secret South Pole fortress of solitude, either. These were prime opportunities for the film to get us invested, to make us excited, but it just kind of blandly laid events out. Choosing any one of these as THE BIG CLIMAX and working around them would have automatically made the film more engaging.
I think the strongest parts of the plot were the little backstory vignettes that composed the first half of the film. Each was its own little mini-movie and they were fairly effective. But all these great, complex characters were all set up only to essentially go through the superhero motions at the end. DISAPPOINTING.
I'm sure a lot of people have talked about the music, so I won't spend a lot of time on it, but I found it REALLY distracting. Did we really need that Simon & Garfunkle song at the funeral? Did we need "99 Luftballons" in the restaurant? Sometimes gaps without dialogue can stand on their own! I feel like the insertion of the songs there represented a huge lack of faith in the power of the visual narrative.
All in all, for a film that was supposed to run dark and deep, there were a lot of silly giggles in the theater when I saw it. Some at the almost comedically explicit violence, some at the sort of cliched lead-ins to the Silk Specter/Nite Owl sex scenes, some just at awkward dialogue. I think a lot of the laughter could have been avoided if (sorry Zack Snyder) it had been put in the hands of a more skillful director. Snyder is great with action scenes, but he cannot do drama for the life of him.
Any drama the film had was salvaged by the fantastic Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. I've only ever seen him (that I remember) in Little Children, but he was fantastic in that as well, obviously in a very different way. In Watchmen, a film where most other actors were kind of sadly smiling and shrugging their way through, he was absolutey in the zone.
In closing, I'm sure that this film works excellently as a supplement to the comic book, but it absolutely does not hold up as a standalone film.
Leave a comment