No magic at all in Alan Moore’s Watchmen

 

by Jennifer Boulden

Much to my surprise, the magic of Watchmen never happened for me. It did not happen for me with the graphic novel, and it most definitely did not happen for me with the film.

I was sure it would, for one of them at least. I’ve read so much about what a dizzying accomplishment the graphic novel was, marrying hard intellectualism to dark artistry, subverting every superhero-or even regular hero-cliché it could find to subvert, broaching topics from rape and torture to geopolitics and nuclear proliferation with an unflinching eye, and weaving together a piecemeal narrative from wildly disparate and unconventional elements in a startlingly complex feat of structural engineering. It sounded great.

I’d read this, heard this over and over. I’d known dozens people who loved it and I knew of countless critics’ praise and hushed respect for Alan Moore’s groundbreaking accomplishment, named one of the greatest novels ever written. The implication surrounding it often seemed to be that if you didn’t enjoy it, you were superficial, shallow, naïve, sheltered, stupid, or else just not paying close enough attention. I definitely didn’t want to be among those; I wanted to be one of those geeky gals who got it.

When I started reading Watchmen, I was indeed amazed at how well it was drawn and how confident the narrative voi ce was, especially as it veered off in unpredictable directions each time I started to get comfortable with a segment. I liked the idea of superheroes as just ordinary people with skewed self-identities and a penchant for dressing up to fight crime. I appreciated the inevitable and unenviable ethical quandaries that would ensue with a rash of masked vigilantes doing law and order’s dirty work. I was somewhat puzzled by Moore’s need to also integrate Dr. Manhattan, the godlike once-man with a supreme command of physics and a supremely detached view of humanity-into a story that already seemed to have enough meat to chew on, but, whatever. It’s his story. I can let him tell it.

Except that it just went on and on. For all the narrative acrobatics and riveting artwork, I did not give a flip about any of the characters or their plights. The world of Watchman was one that reveled in the ugly and the obtusely convoluted and I felt like it was trying way too hard to impress me with its uncompromising grit and pop erudition. It was all shock and structure, with no soul. I found myself being less and less impressed and more and more annoyed that I could not find a meaningful character or story arc to latch onto as the choppy layers upon layers lurched forward on Moore’s sea of discontent. Increasingly bored, I gave up on it about three-fourths of the way through. I just didn’t want to read it any more.

Still, I recognized that just because it wasn’t my cuppa tea, didn’t mean it wasn’t steeped in all sorts of good juices. It’s not really fair to judge a film based on a book you didn’t finish, anyway, so I extended it some credit. I’ve sometimes found film adaptations much more accessible than the book. I was hoping this might be the case with Watchmen, the film, as the screenwriters would necessarily streamline the core story and find a more engaging way to relay its various themes, give it fresh energy. It wasn’t..

The film lost me from the first awkward pre-title sequence expository frames onward, and did little to change my opinion for the better as the movie progressed. The film’s visuals are one of its strongest assets since they adhere so closely to the stunning storyboarded panels of the original. This also means that while technically masterful recreations of the rich comic panels, they are exponentially more staid and lifeless on the screen. Snyder never understands that what works graphically in a comic is likely not the same artistic choice the original artist would have made, had he been able to make his comics move on the page. His team brings almost no imagination to the storyboarding; it is a Madame Tussaud’s homage to Watchmen we see rather than a living incarnation of Alan Moore’s imaginings. Seeing all the recognizable money shots is a curiosity at best.

Likewise, the people in the film look stunningly like they are supposed to look, yet something is still lost in translation. Every line and fold of Patrick Wilson’s heavier face was in just the right place for Dan Dryberg, the impotent Nite Owl whose character is given much too little to do, a further emasculation of his character by the film itself. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian left Dead Ghost Denny from Grey’s Anatomy far behind to do a perfect impersonation of Watchmen’s version of The Joker, yet the character lacks the charisma to make his embrace of chaos in the face of disillusionment anything more than the actions of a power-crazed asshole. Jackie Earle Haley was by far the best of the bunch, not only looking like Rorshach but giving him a steely vulnerability that had some appeal and an undeniable on-screen intensity, even as his character and blotshifting mask defied plausibility or sympathy.

As for Malin Akerman in the female lead role, I am still dumbfounded. She may be a woman of remarkable talents, but nothing I saw in Watchman gave any indication that among them was being able to act with any more gravitas than a Saturday morning cartoon. She was at a disadvantage from the start, however, as I am thoroughly convinced Alan Moore does not know or care the first thing about women or have any interest in making them more than flat and vulnerable, lust-inducing insipidities that confuse potent female power with pert=2 0female menace. In that sense, then, Akerman was perfectly cast. Because I could not care less about her-being pretty and cheerfully willing to save the token innocents from harm whilst wearing a vinyl teddy and whore heels isn’t enough to gain my respect-the plot revelations that centered on her emotional journey were tedious at best for me and more commonly laughable. I cringed every single time she opened her mouth, until I decided to entertain myself with predicting if she could possibly get worse, and by golly, she came through for me in scene after godawful scene.

The musical cues were as cumbersome, obvious and uninspired as I had heard others relate. Truly, truly awful and distracting, and I say this as someone who often misses soundtrack cues entirely when caught up in a movie. Clunky efforts to ground the music in 1980s music culture just made them stand out all the more, to their detriment.

As for the R-rated violence, it felt juvenile to me. Graphic violence is the sort of thing I find arresting in a playfully impish Tarantino flick, or a visceral Scorsese or Cronenberg crime drama, sometimes a war picture. Here, it was somehow both gratuitously disgusting and aesthetically boring. The action sequences were as innovative as a Kung Fu episode and Snyder gave into his worst urges, using slow-mo close-ups of flesh wounds and other shock gore to evoke easily impressed fanboys’ “Whoas!” instead of more subt le and powerful cinematic wows.

There has been some debate about whether Watchmen is too heavy on plot or is not very interested in plot at all. Personally, I found it both heavy and uninteresting. It lacked the momentum and energy that propels a plot-driven film towards a climax, yet contained so many expository segments, awkward backstories of people we did not know or care about, attempts at laying forth a trail of stale breadcrumbs in the whodunit, underdeveloped subplots, and a criminally weak-minded denoument dreamed up by the apparent smartest man in the world that I can see almost no argument for calling it a tone poem. It was too many things, and nothing at all, a lumpy glob of elements strung into a film reel. An utter lack of focus and a few electric blue musings on humanity by a naked, oracle-eyed being levitating lotus-style over Mars does not a tone poem make.

And I found it much, much too long and self-indulgent to the detriment of the pacing and cohesion of the many incongruent elements. The best joke of the film is how many times someone asks some permutation of the question, “Why can’t this just end?” My husband and I laughed out loud, heartily, the first time when Laurie pleads with John to skip ahead and tell her the ending. Yes, please! After that, we were amused and bemused by how many other blatant occurrences of that question are posed. Was everyone involved in the project so taken with the ir work that they could not see the irony there?

Which brings me to a final point or two. The pretentiousness and seriousness of it all. For filmgoers who go to the movies looking to enjoy the Snydergore and perchance a naked Akerman, I can see where this could be entertaining. I had no illusions Watchmen would be a fun romp, and I was not looking for superhero camp, action movie clichés or a sweeping romance. Still, it would have been nice to have had a little less of the Grislier Than Thou attitudes and a little more with the relatable human touches. Watchmen takes itself and its perceived mission of removing the wool from our eyes so seriously, that I could not begin to take it as anything more than a ridiculous pomposity. The surreal images being thrust upon the audience from the Nixonian alternate reality complete with naked blue godliness to the pretty-but-what-does-it-do crystal watchworks castle on Mars require a more deft touch than Snyder can manage. Yet, he presents these things with such earnestness and belief that his visionary message and newly discovered nihilism will change our world forever (as the trailer promised) that instead of grounding them in a relevant reality we can grasp and appreciate, they are thrown up on the screen in such a way that they dare us not to laugh at their innate silliness and self-importance.

At its dark heart, Watchmen espouses only shock, violence cynicism and deceit as weapons of mass evoluti on. It thinks so little of humanity, that it is mystifying why anyone, let alone an omnipotent blue nightlight of a man, would want to save the world from its bleak and damaged self. It’s a shallow, adolescent worldview that romanticizes all things dark while minimizing the softness and goodness in the world, and one that I would like to believe has little resonance today. The noirish Rorschach alone growls some beautifully grim and brooding language from time to time that threatens to reveal the idealism, sans hope, at the core of his dysfunction, but it is lost in the darkness because no one is listening. They are all staring at the doomsday clock, waiting for the blasted movie to end.