Usually I know better than to let myself get caught up in the hype of impending movies. Watchmen, based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel of the same name, found itself as an exception to that rule. Early trailers seemed to promise a film that would follow in the footsteps of the re-booted Batman franchise: Approaching superhero mythology not as escapist fantasy, but as something that is plausible within our own contemporary world.
As if the promise of the word "cerebral" riding in the same car as the word "superhero" was not enough to whet the appetite of both movie goers and comic book lovers alike, Watchmen's trailers offered a faint whiff of hope that the film would remain loyal to the darkly comedic, often depressing but still brilliant piece of Reagan-era pseudo-sedition upon which it is based. Set in an alternate reality 1985 where America wins Vietnam and Nixon has been elected to a fifth term in office, the graphic novel is held as seminal for elevating the comic book to the level of literature. But much to the chagrin of this reviewer, Watchmen is best seen as a loosely inspired carbon copy of its source material. While Watchmen adhered fairly well to the plot of the graphic novel, it is noticeably lacking in any of the subtext, social commentary, character depth and moral ambiguity of its namesake.
I won't go so far as to echo the sentiments of Slate.com's Dana Stevens and suggest that "Zack Snyder performed a lab experiment on Alan Moore's wonderfully human sized story." It is fairer to say that Watchmen demonstrates that Snyder, whose only other claim to fame is the contentious and ultra-violent 300, has not evolved beyond his status as a neophyte director. Snyder seems incapable of conveying nuance or subtext without marrying it with gore, ritualized violence and answering the question: "How would this particular actress look topless?"
Moore and Gibbons were not bashful about exploring the sexual motivations of super heroes in their graphic novel. The love triangle between Doctor Manhattan/Jonathan Osterman (Billy Crudup), Nite Owl II/Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Specter II/Laurie Juspeczyk (Malin Akerman) called Laurie Jupiter in the screen adaptation was often tumultuous, vengeful and left readers with the odd aftertaste of costume fetishism. In Snyder's defense, I do not think him ignorant of this theme, nor the graphic novel's other significant subtexts; his attempt to portray subtlety on screen, however, is almost unforgivably clumsy.
Case in point: Only after bringing Nite Owl out of retirement can Dan Drieberg transition from being a sexually dysfunctional caricature of Clark Kent into a James T. Kirk dynamo who wastes no time peeling Malin Akerman out of a latex get-up that beats out the Catwoman costume for best adolescent S&M fantasy. Is this change in Nite Owl/Drieberg the result of a catharsis after years of repressing his innermost vigilante self? Is Snyder trying explore the personal lives of people that have been scarred from staring too long into the abyss while trying to change the world for the better? Who knows because we're too busy watching Malin Akerman writhe while being rogered over the controls of the Archimedes the Watchmen's aircraft/submersible. Throughout the film, Snyder gives us gratuity when the source material screams for reflection and pensive thought.
To open Watchmen's early scenes, the film's psychologically disturbed narrator Rorschach/Walter Kovacs (Jackie Earle Haley) asks an essential question: Why is he the only one that has mental disorders? Moore and Gibbons showed us the behind-the-mask suffering of heroes whose well intentioned deeds often made a bad situation worse. Rather than probing the essential humanity of the Watchmen, Snyder's movie gives us the safety of familiar stereotypes.
The Comedian/Edward Blake (Jeffery Dean Morgan), whose death acts as a catalyzing event in this super hero detective story, is a morally ambiguous soldier/government agent. Cast as the Shakespearian fool, The Comedian sees the truth of our cold and indifferent world. Rather than explore the agony of The Comedian's character, he is created as a shallow symbol of Vietnam-era baby killing.
Rorschach, similarly, is by most definitions a criminal sociopath. However, the film seems all too content to paint a childhood exposure to his mother's prostitution as the reason for his uncompromising view of the world as a corrupt cesspool. Reducing these characters to their component parts, a basic exercise in cause-and-effect character building, removes Watchmen from our real world and places it back within the comfortable context of comic book mythology.
Real people are not driven by one event; we are the culmination of each day of our lives. To ignore this central theme of the graphic novel is to reduce Watchmen to a slightly grittier, marginally sexier version of the Fantastic Four or an X-Men that neglects to touch on the issue of mutant persecution.
Like a depressed child genius with overbearing parents, Watchmen shapes up as a mediocre superhero movie that utterly fails to live up to its potential. In all fairness, it's not the worst way to spend two hours and forty minutes, especially if you lack familiarity with the graphic novel. History nerds will smile as an extra jowly Nixon turns to a haggard Henry Kissinger in his Doctor Strangelove inspired war room and asks, "Henry, what the hell are we going to do?" A soundtrack featuring music that spanned the decades of the Cold War adds a pleasant accent, teasing familiarity out of this alternate universe and lending it a sense of credibility.
Watchmen does have its moments, but in the hands of a veteran director it could have been so much more than a specter of its former self.