By Elliot Boswell
Amid the slew of graphic novel adaptations that have emerged in the last five years or so, we can now welcome "Watchmen" to the fold.
Like some of its peers, "Watchmen" retains the paranoia and stylized violence and, like others, it does away with the "traditional" superhero and any trace of identifiable human interaction. And on the whole, it's a stupid, sordid urban fantasy too intent on ending humanity's self-destruction to give a whit about humanity itself.
Set in an alternate universe, "Watchmen," based faithfully on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and directed by Zach Snyder, necessarily begins with a conceit: It is 1985 and thanks to our team of superheroes, the United States won a crushing victory in the Vietnam War, and as a result, Richard Nixon is now in his fifth term as president.
Taking over where the Reagan administration otherwise would have been, Nixon is engaged in a nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union, a stalemate which is growing increasingly more fragile. Near the start of the film, the Doomsday Clock, an actual device, is moved to five minutes before midnight; "midnight" signifying nuclear holocaust and the annihilation of all mankind.
This history is merely a backdrop for the Watchmen to play out their trials and tribulations, but only half of the gang is really worth noting. With the exception of Dr. Manhattan, all the Watchmen are human.
First, we have the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a brutal, amoral man whose early death provides the plot with much of its impetus, but who still gets ample screen time in a number of flashbacks.
Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is the only remaining vigilante among them, a paranoid schizophrenic-type who wanders around in a shape-shifting mask, intoning nihilistic invectives and breaking limbs wherever he sees fit.
Finally, there is the aforementioned Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only legitimate superhero in the film, who roughly resembles a naked android version of Babe the Blue Ox; Supposedly, he was a gifted nuclear physicist before the perfunctory comic book lab accident left him with extraordinary powers and the ability to speak only monotonically.
The other three Watchmen, however, are practically indistinguishable from each other: Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) is the shy one, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is the publicity-hungry one, and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) is the woman, but none have any discernable superpowers or many memorable moments.
What follows is ostensibly a romp through the dark night of an alternate universe's soul, but really it's just an exercise in cinematic savagery and cynicism, assaulting the audience at almost every turn. Snyder is better known as the director of "300," a mindless "historical epic," and while "Watchmen" certainly shares the same love for blood-spattered over-stimulation, its attempts at political commentary are more in line with the less violent but equally vapid "V for Vendetta."
Like "V," this film dreams of being read as a cautionary tale to those of us who don't believe that voting Republican will inevitably end in a totalitarian nightmare, and like "V," it presents such a cartoonishly single-minded vision that the only people who'll take the bait are paranoid, left-wing hacks.
For example, One of Nixon's lackeys utters the gem, "Everyone knows 'free' is just another word for 'socialism.'" Perhaps it is slightly subtler than a sledgehammer, but only slightly.
More problematic, however, is "Watchmen's" extreme obsession with violence and the lengths that the movie goes to justify its use. (It's telling that Snyder's production company is dubbed "Cruel and Unusual Films.")
Dr. Manhattan, in almost single-handedly winning the Vietnam War, doesn't just beat the commies - one by one, he literally blows each individual Viet Cong to smithereens, which is followed by a scene of victory fireworks exploding similarly across the sky. The irony isn't funny; it's sick.
Rorschach, though, is the most distressing offender. Not telling him what he wants to hear? No matter - he'll simply break your arms, complete with the appropriate crunch of bone busting through skin, just in case we didn't get the point. When he hunts down a child's kidnapper only to discover he's arrived too late, Snyder shows us two dogs gnawing on the little girl's femur. Why, why, why?
The worst part is that we are invited to excuse Rorschach's actions on the grounds that he is a product of a brutal society. "I used to be too soft on criminals," he says in a voiceover. "I let them live." It's a statement that Mussolini or Pol Pot might have appreciated.
There are other, lesser issues, of course. The soundtrack is a Greatest Hits of Unimaginative Moviemaking, from Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" in the opening credits (so we're aware that the times are, well, changing) to a cosmically bad spaceship love scene set to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."
There are cheap literary allusions to Juvenal and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others. The dialogue is a ridiculous mimicry of the hard-boiled genre: When Rorschach is asked if a bloodstain is in fact a spot of "bean juice," he responds with, "Yeah ... Human bean juice."
True to its original source material, "Watchmen" is an effort to deconstruct the omnipotent superhero, turning him instead into a flawed mortal. This would be all well and good, a refreshing shot of humanity, had it not been replaced with bloody smiley faces and a black hole where humor might have otherwise been found.
Near the very end of the film, Ozymandias proclaims, "I'm not a comic book villain." Is this supposed to be funny? A dose of meta-comics, maybe?
But the truth is that over the course of the previous two and a half hours, "Watchmen" has ground even the potential for laughter out of us, and with it, our tolerance for Manhattan and Co. as well.
