Clocking in at 163 minutes, the screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse tends to lose an audience, who likely are unfamiliar with Moore’s marvelous graphic novel, in the delicacies of an intricately satirical back-story. The film also smacks of liberal ideology without the subtlety and humor of the textual original: In the opening sequence, Ozymandias is pictured outside the notorious Studio 54, accompanied by a small legion of drag queens and ephebic young men; Rorschach’s moralizing about an “awful city” “scream[ing] like an abattoir full of retarded children” is written and acted to offend, not to ruminate; and Tricky Dick’s ostensibly prosthetic face is notable for its nose, which rivals a Naso Turco reproduction of Pinocchio.
Despite the manifold problems of Watchmen, it ultimately succeeds—utilizing all the appurtenances of the genre, from the classic camp of the 1960s live action Batman television series to the trope of the government science project gone terribly wrong, Watchmen carefully deconstructs vigilante heroism and generic humanism with razor precision.
Dr. Manhattan, whose ultra-masculine appearance is belied by his gentle mannerism and speech, is the superhero most proximate to divinity I’ve ever seen on the screen, and yet he steadily becomes the poster child for deism: an awesomely powerful being who is moments away from being completely divorced from the human condition. In the most visually stunning scene of the movie, he creates an airborne clock of crystal with the smooth and steady elegance of a strandbeest, powered not by wind but aesthetics and the human imagination. He struggles to understand his lover, and not in the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” ideology—even though, ironically, Mars is where he takes her for their holiday. Dr. Manhattan cannot connect with Laurie Jupiter because he is not of this world—and often doesn’t occupy it. The opening sequence shows him shaking hands with a doomed JFK, who is shot in the next montage—does omniscience and quantum omnipotence require action? Are we to expect heroism from Dr. Manhattan, to whom much was given, but also from whom so much was taken away?
Ozymandias directly challenges the genre’s—and, most importantly, our—conceptualization of good and evil, and yet his meisterstück, with which I am still, days later, struggling, is tainted by Shelley’s irony: “Nothing beside remains: round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Will the ending, the only new material the movie brings to bear, and the world that follows be reverted to its original state by the memoirs of a madman? Can the “works” of Ozymandias bring the permanency he hoped, when his name’s sake is etched in the Western canon as a hubristic and myopic tyrant?
I recommend going to see Watchmen, and give it 3 out 4 stars. If you’re a Chicagoan, you may run into me as I return to the theater or Hallowed Grounds to parse the eerie Rorschach, and his ever-shifting mask, more closely.
Watchmen is rated R by the MPAA for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language.
