 HE BLUE HIMSELF EARLY THIS MORNING: Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan. |
When Zack Snyder’s long-awaited film of Watchmen mercifully reaches what seems like an even longer-awaited ending, the director invites pop-punks My Chemical Romance to perform a thrash cover of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” I don’t believe the band manages to finish the song, so they miss the lyrics that best apply to the act of adaptation: “All these people that you mention/ Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame./ I had to rearrange their faces/ and give them all another name.”
Snyder is all about rearranging faces—preferably via slow-motion fist or flying cleaver—but he doesn’t have the courage to tamper with Alan Moore’s apocalyptic graphic novel beyond tarting it up with extended fights and protracted gore. Moore’s Watchmen remains a pleasure to read 20 years after its publication not because of its supposed “darkness”—which often just consists of the slippery-slope fallacy, with the slope greased in blood—but because of its eagerness to play with the clichés of comic books, like they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. The movie is afraid to touch anything, for fear of breaking the wrapper. So the tiny decision of what song to play atop the closing credits becomes a symbol of the movie’s devotion to source material it doesn’t understand: The tune is there, and most of the words, but all of the important feelings have gone missing. Lame.
There are a lot of people to mention, so settle in: The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a mustachioed mercenary who is thrown out of a high-rise in the first scene, but returns in flashbacks to treat everybody like shit. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), who investigates the murder, is a masked vigilante who growls like Dirty Harry wearing a filthy sock over his head. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is a supercilious industrialist who, being “the smartest man in the world,” figures he’s duty-bound to avert an imminent World War III by dressing like Ziggy Stardust. Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) is still ineffectually pining for Silk Spectre II (Malin Ackerman), who is in turn shacked up with government weapon Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). Manhattan isn’t much interested in her, suffering as he is from a severe case of philosophical blue balls—blue everything, really, since he has been disintegrated by a particle cannon and returned azure, luminous and naked. There is also the world’s worst Richard Nixon impersonator.
The resulting disappointment (and the boredom) are even greater because for the first five minutes of Watchmen, Snyder seems ready to try something truly inventive. In the opening credits—which play over another Dylan song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”—Snyder marches through an alternate U.S. history, in which caped avengers invade major American cultural milestones. (A leather-garbed vixen named Silhouette even commandeers V-J Day to lay a lesbian smooch on a Times Square nurse.) The sequence is remarkably clever, but it hints at a distressing turn: Each tableau looks like it’s been filled not with real people, but painstakingly molded waxworks. That inhuman glaze, at least partly created by computer touch-ups, continues for the next 2 1/2 hours, until the movie appears to be the first superhero movie populated by action figurines. Watchmen could be a work from the visionary director of Madame Tussauds.
You can appreciate Snyder’s caring curation as he puts these outcasts through their paces, and he occasionally finds the right tone for a oldies montage or two—though mostly he settles for a Watchmen Hit Parade remarkable for its ghoulish violence. (He has a special weakness for setting men aflame—six by my count, not including the self-immolating monk on a TV set.) He only varies this approach at the much-debated ending, which has been altered but still manages (avert your eyes, newbies) to annihilate most of New York City. But where the comic lamented the human wreckage for five wordless pages, the movie barely pauses. It has no room for sadness—the dangerous emotion that would radically upend all the role-playing games. Instead, this Watchmen would rather sit in the dark with its toy heroes, plastic gods who use us for their sport. Well, screw them.
SEE IT: Watchmen is rated R. It opens Friday at Broadway, Cedar Hills, Eastport, Cinema 99, CineMagic, Cinetopia, City Center, Cornelius, Evergreen, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Lloyd Mall, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Roseway, Sandy, Sherwood, St. Johns Twin Cinema-Pub, Tigard and Wilsonville.
