Watchmen
Peter: It isn't for everyone, but this is too unique of an experience to pass up.
More than just a well-behaved "comic book movie," this is a beautiful, go-for-broke experience. Aspects inherently limited, yet hinted at, in the graphic novel, are enhanced in the film with terrific grace--music, choreography, precise editing. Yes, the movie could not possibly be as dense as the source material, but what we have here is a fair trade.
How about that title sequence? Was there ever a moment in the movies where they got it so right? It is safe to assume that, for expository reasons, it was hard coded into the shooting script. This is the most lovingly conceived title sequence I have ever seen in a recent movie; maybe in any movie. The only one I can recall with such fondness is "Once Upon a Time in the West."
Your old road is rapidly agin' / Please get out of the new one / If you can't lend your hand...
That it is purely an invention of the movie, inspired by the comics, is a testament to Snyder's ambitions: he is not content with transplanting a comic book as if it were a cadaver brought to life, ala Rodriguez's "Sin City"--which was more a nod to comics than to movies; and Nolan's "The Dark Knight" was more a nod to movies than to comics. Dissatisfied with the unreal backdrops of Sin City and his own Thermopylae, and abandoning the realness of Chicago's Gotham, Snyder constructs a New York that resides somewhere in the purgatory of our dreams. It inhabits a look both noirish and nostalgic.
Slanted journalism is as brutal as an unfair fight.
The plot, with its flashbacks and allusions, can rub off as emotionally impenetrable. This is not a problem of the movie. "Watchmen" is a true revisionist fable that operates on the abstract level of fantasy. This world reveals itself through layers; it can be excused if individual scenes don't add up to much. That it sidesteps a twisty, literal plot for traditional narrative drive, like its opposite twin "The Dark Knight," is not an oversight. This is a mosaic. If Eisner was correct that comics force the viewer to participate, and that film is merely observational, then "Watchmen" bridges the gap: it is possible to relish each shot contextually. There is, for example, a joy in the movie's set design that captures a history and mood that dialog alone would make redundant.
Consider the ambush in the alley and it's juxtaposition to the television interview. Each punch, each bone-breaking karate chop, is, through skillful editing, delivered alongside nasty verbal attacks in the interview, which is itself a cleverly disguised ambush. This is a visual irony, a sequence lifted faithfully from the comics. In movie form, it returns to its home of Soviet film theory. The swiftness of the cross-cutting between two unrelated events elevates it into montage: without the play-by-play visual ironies, the point would be lost. Snyder handles this translation faithfully, while seemingly improving upon it; a fact the movie gets little credit for.
For those who like to watch: notice the carefully arranged picture on the right. We're so in the 80s.
"Watchmen" is at its most fascinating (and alienating) when it chooses to meditate on its plot rather than telling it. Is this a flaw, as others have complained? Consider the opening shot, which establishes its "point" within a single sweep of motion: it starts out in the gutter with an extreme close-up of the smiley face, then pulls out and up to the top of a skyrise suite, with a detective looking down. That he has a bald spot is a detail perhaps unbeknown to him, but a detail that we clearly see from our (higher up) perspective. Observing the crime scene, his partner mutters, "I think this is way bigger than any of us," and the shot belittles them by zooming out to a panorama of the city. Later on, a god-like character of certainly the highest perspective, remarks that human life is overrated next to the enormity of the universe.
This kind of narrative ambiguity will not go over well with an audience expecting a blockbuster plot with the engine of a hummingbird. Many will feel detached by the film's assault of imagery over cohesion. I suspect the movie, like the novel, contains more ideas than drama. Is this a defect? I can recall Kubrick's response to critics when pressed about the "point" of one of his films, a certain science fiction piece: "It's either obvious or impossible to explain. It's not a message I ever intend to convey in words."
And on and on. The graphic novel, thus the movie, is sequentially constructed as an elaborate visual pun. That it carries itself, elegantly, from beginning to end with hidden meanings and secret symbols is merely a way to enrich the experience. There is a story, a mood, a kind of visceral joy embedded in the movie's DNA that will be overlooked. It is not an intellectual requirement to read the film in this manner; no less is it a requirement to enjoy Macbeth as an indictment on absolute power. Oh, it could exist at face value. "Macbeth is just about this dude who goes crazy, that's all. It was okay. Not enough explosions."
But who'd wanna go and do that?
