With Juvenal as a Tagline: Watchmen Reviewed
In the midst of an ever-darkening conspiracy, Watchmen resurrects a disbanded group of disaffected—and outlawed—vigilantes to uncover a ghastly plot to destroy New York City as Russia and the United States teeter on the brink of nuclear holocaust.
Watchmen is a bold deconstruction of the superhero narrative. It challenges our understanding of the basic ideological engine that drives the run-of-the-mill superhero movie, laying to rest the unilluminating, good-versus-evil character conflicts that would reduce all the big problems of modern life to a pedantic Zoroastrianism. Yet the fever pitch of the movie’s iconoclastic nuances tend to leave the plot caught in the dreaded eddy of a plodding pace, leaving the audience behind if they aren’t familiar with the movie’s rich source material.
Set in a dystopic 1985 in which Nixon has been re-elected four times (Heavens forfend) and the United States stands on the brink of nuclear war with Russia, Watchmen’s action is initiated by the death of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) at the hands of a darkly clothed assailant. This is a world where the status of superhero vigilante requires no paranormal aptitudes but only such mundane peculiarities as the superior intelligence we find in the hero Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), or the psychotic instability and moral wrath we see in Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley). Indeed, it seems that anyone with a bone to pick—and sufficient access to unlicensed firearms—can take up a mask, all the due accessories of heroism, and oftentimes the heavy moral obligation and inability to ever truly hang up the cape. The only character in Watchmen who possesses true superpowers is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the product of a to-be-expected, top-secret experiment funded by the government in the 1950s. His powers are just joules away from godhood: he exists on the quantum level, seeing all his past, present, and future simultaneously, able to teleport himself and others, grow and shrink in size, bi- (tri- and quad-, &c.) locate, and even create life.
In the midst of an ever-darkening conspiracy, which Rorschach discovers while investigating the death of the unfathomably ruthless Comedian, Watchmen resurrects a disbanded group of disaffected—and outlawed—vigilantes to uncover a ghastly plot to destroy New York City as Russia and the United States teeter on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The movie, however cosmic its scope, tantalizingly problemitizes the jejune and diurnal lives of the nocturnal heroes. Family problems, psychotic instability, plotting, disaffectedness, and insecurity abound in the de-masked lives of the Watchmen. The Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman)—even though her acting is a little unrelieved—struggles with a distant boyfriend, sexual tension with a coworker, and an alcoholic mother who clings to the specter of the times that were.
Zack Snyder’s direction works all the visual tropes of his previous works—action sequences replete with slow motion and odd camera angles—but occasionally exhibits the flair that caused Warner Brothers to hail him a “visionary director”; God knows I’ll never enter a bathroom inhabited by a midget with the same ease ever again. The movie lovingly reproduces the source material, with shot after shot seemingly storyboarded from the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and that religious attention adds to the bloat of the film.
