Ok, I saw the movie. Spoilers ahead.
I’m still unsure of what I feel about the movie. It’s been a few hours and though I’m pretty sure I disliked it, I’m still thinking about it a lot. It’s no masterpiece of cinema, this I can assure.
First, the acting: I disliked both Silk Spectres. Malin Akerman I actually thought was less to blame than Carla Gugino. She’s no great actress that’s for sure, but still I think she made the best of very poor material. Spectre II’s background was so heavily edited out of the movie that her big scene on Mars was never going to work. She did good on the action scenes and was hot on both her sex scenes with Dan. The sex scene with Doc Manhattan was a mess, true, but by no fault of her’s. Now, Carla Gugino I felt gave really odd readings of her lines when old and never really rang true. She was very sexy as a young Sally, though. Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson were good, Billy Cruddup was very good and Jackie Earle Hailey was great. Every time he was seen with his mask off was thrilling. The rasping voice did take some getting used to.
What else… well, Nixon didn’t bother me, the beginning montage was good but not as good as I expected from the reviews I read, Mars was magical, the violence is the most graphic I think I’ve seen in a movie and the sex scene in the Owlship was really hot!
Now, to the meat of it: the greatest fault in the movie is its got no heart. It’s beautiful to watch; the sets are works of art and Snyder’s just wonderful when it comes to arresting visuals and visual world building, but things are almost never compelling emotionally. Partly the blame is the script’s own, I suppose, but Snyder never feels warm or intimate. The only touching moments in movie are Rorschach’s and Doctor Manhattan’s, whose reminiscing on Mars is actual great film. The rest of it maybe exciting, titillating, amusing, shocking or whatever, but it’s pleasures are either visceral or coldly intellectual, never sentimental. Sometimes it feels like a Kubrick movie gone wrong. I was often reminded of “A Clockwork Orange”, my least favourite movie of his I’ve watched.
The excision of all the little “little people” moments hurts the story immeasurably. Without spending time with the newsdealer and the kid who read the comics, by not taking time to show us the psychiatrist’s reaction to treating Rorschach and his home life and troubles, by not showing us the squabbling lesbians, the climax of the movie doesn’t work. The whole thing’s so pessimistic and nihilistic that, without having seen the little (and great) acts of kindness ordinary people are capable of, without having Holis’ death as an example of the genuine horror of meaningless death, with no small dramas and tiny everyday crisis to empathize with, when millions die by the end we just don’t care. The ethical dilemma the movie poses is not whether the ends justify the means when the means are so horrific, it’s whether this particular end (the salvation of mankind) is valid at all!
I’ll admit to a little hyperbole here, but not much. Sure, the movie is already hideously long as is, these cuts were very likely necessary. But I maintain that without those story elements, as it was actually filmed, the thing’s no more than a sadistic superhero story with good atmosphere and great set-pieces. Maybe a different director could make it work, I don’t know.
I was also bothered with the quality of the script for a lot of other things. I don’t want to parrot other reviews I’ve read on the web but: “Whatever happened to the American Dream?” “The American Dream? This is it. We’re living it!” doesn’t work when actually spoken on the screen and neither do several other lines. The movie is severely muddled and has no forward momentum whatsoever for maybe two thirds of its running time. Also, the new ending doesn’t work. The concept of it is fine and I have no problem with it, it doesn’t seem to be inherently better or worse than the squid. But the execution is lacking. After unspeakable and lovingly shot acts of graphic violence throughout the movie when the end comes it’s much too clean. I can live without gruesome extra dimensional squid flesh, but no blood? Not one drop, not one body? The thing’s hygienic! Where’s the shock and the impact? Why suddenly go for metaphysical horror after more than two hours of visceral gross-outs?
Tying in with discussion of the ending, Matthew Goode was awful. He had no presence, physical or otherwise, his accent and line readings were bizarre and he seemed mildly stoned all the time! His was a performance comprised entirely of wrong notes. Also, what the hell were the scriptwriters going for in the Lee Iaccoca scene? It was just stilted exposition of unneeded background material for Veidt.
In the end, it seems to me Zack Snyder lovingly adapted the text of Watchmen to the big screen while leaving behind all the sub-text, the conceptual play, the formalistic games, and subtly humanistic themes that actually made it one of the greatest comics I’ve ever read. The story of Watchmen is okay, the set-pieces go from interesting to awesome and the background is fascinating, that’s true, but those aren’t the point! The point is how Moore and Gibbons tell the story, the point is ethical discussion on power and its uses and its ethics and the thing, damn it, is humanistic, not nihilistic! When Moore transformed ideal supermen into deeply flawed men in masks and cast them in so hellish a world Nixon was in his fifth term as president he still managed to them reserve some sympathy. Dirty paranoid Rorschach has immense dignity as he walks out into the snow to die. Dan is allowed to gain his manhood back, Laurie and Sally manage some peace with the past, even the Comedian, monster that he was, is showed as being capable of basic positive humanity, in his rejection of Veidt’s plan. Rorschach’s defining moment, the murder of the child kidnapper and murderer is made to seem much too cool in the movie. It’s supposed to be horrific not only because a child died and was then avenged in a ruthless manner, but because that’s the moment Walter Kovaks the man became unable to cope any more and disassociated into his masked persona. In the book the greatest sin, the one Ozymandias commits, is to willfully distance oneself from humanity and cast judgment on it. It’s only when he makes peace with Jon Osterman that Doctor Manhattan’s allowed to become the god he had the potential to be. Nothing in the movie spoke to me about the need to accept one’s own faults and those of others, of the need of kindness to oppose evil, of the inherent dangers of the use of power or of personal responsibility or of a number of other things it could and should have.
For all it’s supposedly uncompromising nature, the movie underestimates the audience’s intellect continuously by its refusal to engage in any meaningful problematisation (is this a word in english?) of anything that actually matters. Violence is still okay and free of consequences in the movie, as long as its done by the good guys. However there’s never any doubt in the movie of whom the good guys are. Even the insistence of calling the second generation of vigilantes “The Watchmen” muddles an important point in the discussion this movie should elicit but won’t. It is adult in its violence and sexual content but never in the way it thinks.
Sorry about the length of this post. Seems I am naturally long winded. All of the above is obviously IMO.
P.S. Doctor Manhattans big blue dick is both big and blue, I’ll grant it. Why every single professional reviewer feels a need to mention and sometimes to criticize it however I have no idea. I honestly wouldn’t have given it a single thought were it not for the fact so many people talk about it. It’s not even that easy to see because of the weird color and the blue glow.
). Though it occurs to me that if her performance/dialogue was truer to the original comic…people (mostly the audience members who hadn’t read the book yet, which can’t be brushed off outright) would probably complain that she was acting too girly and emotional. :smack:
), and in action. But there’s certainly some depth there, and a enough of the original Watchmen at it’s core to make it worthwhile.
I actually think just calling them the Watchmen would have worked better anyways. At first you think, oh it’s the second group after the MINUTEmen, called the WATCHmen, so it’s a play on the earlier name, and then later you realize it also has resonance to the watchmen of the Latin quote, and also resonance with Manhattan’s watchmaker story. The only that doesn’t work is the graffiti Latin quote wouldn’t make as much sense, since if you thought it was referring to the hero group, you’d wonder why when they never got past that first meeting.