Watchmen

Landmark comic-book that reinvented superheroes is faithfully adapted by 300 director Zack Snyder
The irony seeps through the cinema with the sulphurous whiff of Mephistopheles. Watchmen is a frame-by-frame adaptation of Alan Moore's landmark 1980s graphic novel. Moore's guiding script to artist Dave Gibbons all those years ago is the storyboard for director Zack Snyder's re-enactment of the comic-book geek's sacred text. Nearly every line of dialogue comes from Alan Moore's pen, albeit surgically removed from its original setting and transplanted into a 21st century superhero movie. Moore's name is missing from the credits of Watchmen at his own insistence. Yet, has an author ever had his masterpiece treated with the reverence director Zack Snyder displays here? A shift in the nature of the apocalypse that ends the book and the excision of a meta-commentary are the major changes. For those of us who grew up with 'Watchmen' and poured over its every frame, the irony fills our lungs. We can hardly breathe. This is all we ever wanted: the apotheosis of the fanboy. But how much vitality is lost in the cause of fidelity to a sacred text? Watchmen does not involve or engage. With the exception of Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach, the performances are stilted, each actor focused more on fulfilling their role in the re-enactment than bringing a significant interpretation of their own. The attention to detail keeps us at arm's length, a drag not helped by Snyder's over-use of slo-mo. Moore loaded the frames and pages of his book with ironies, sub texts, arch cinematic juxtapositions. But he was working in a different medium. To make a piece of cinema 20 years later that limits itself to those moves, and that dialogue, overloads the film with background while removing the space for improvisation, performance, inspiration - in other words, foreground. Watchmen is set in 1986 in an alternative America. The Cold War is reaching crisis point. The world is five minutes from the midnight of nuclear Armageddon. This is how history would have unfolded if superheroes had actually existed. Nixon is still president, thanks to a victory in Vietnam secured through the help of the blue god-like Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup). JFK was murdered by a government hitman and superhero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and it is the violent murder of the retired Comedian that opens the film. After he is flung through a plate glass window, The Comedian's iconic blood-smeared smiley face button is discovered in the gutter by loner masked vigilante Rorschach. All of these superheroes were once members of the Watchmen, a super-team, until the government declared costumed crime-fighters illegal. Rorschach's hunt for the murderer takes him to his old comrades. His former partner Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) is living the life of an impotent reclusive bachelor and has put on a little prosthetic flab. The ultrapowerful Dr Manhattan is kept in a high security compound with his super-girlfriend Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman). Manhattan perceives the past, present and future simultaneously and can manipulate matter at a sub-atomic level. So he's losing touch with his humanity. Not only is he too rarefied to wear underpants, he also mistakenly believes that replicating his own body to offer Laurie a m??nage a trois will impress her. Finally, there is the world's smartest man, Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), a powerful corporate leader who models himself on Alexander The Great. The graphic novel has some stunning sequences and there is great pleasure in seeing them re-enacted. Dr Manhattan explaining his view of the universe to Laurie while they sail above the surface of Mars in a glass palace of rotating wheels and gears: the story of why Rorschach escalated his fight against crime after encountering a child killer. Watchmen is full of arch juxtapositions. Rorschach's symmetrical ink blot mask a symbol of how Alan Moore's imagination is always finding counterparts and connections. This self-referential density works in a comic-book that you can re-read and pore over. In the constantly flaring and extinguishing nature of film, it's fatally distancing. In entertainment terms, it's all brain and no trousers - much like Dr Manhattan. The irony is that there is such good work in the film that a more ruthless approach to the material would have produced a more involving experience. The failure of Snyder's obsequious approach hangs out to dry assumptions underpinning the nexus of "reimagining" superheroes, the role of internet comic-book movie geeks, and the studios' courting of that audience. The internet made the comic-book geek into an opinion former. Harry Knowles' aintitcool.com established its rep with a report from a disastrous test screening of Batman & Robin that left the film dead in the water. Back then, the 1990s corporate ethos of synergy meant that studios were more interested in the soft drink tie-ins and spin-off toys than the superheroes themselves. The growth of the internet gave a voice to a generation of marginalised souls who took exception to Hollywood's patronising bastardisation of their icons. The rise of that power geek and the revival of the superhero movie as mainstream commercial juggernaut have gone in tandem. At the annual Comic-Con, Hollywood megastars genuflect to the sacred texts while their directors unveil early footage to appreciative whoops, most of which - somehow - ends up on YouTube. The buzz begins early. Teaser trailers. Viral marketing campaigns. Only the verdict arrives late, held in abeyance by a strict embargo that is obeyed by a once-unruly community because they have a lot vested in the movie too, personally and professionally. The makers, marketers and producers of Watchmen have worked so hard to keep this community happy that they have lost sight of what makes a film truly exciting: our emotional engagement with the characters and their story. But the responsibility for that failure lies equally with the fanboy community. They got what they were asking for.
Verdict The result of the fanboy's Faustian pact with the studios.