Mar 20 2009
B+ Movie Review: Watchmen
I don’t normally review movies that were made on any sort of three digit budget or major ad campaign. But today, I feel I need to make an exception for a film that belongs in the B+ Catalog mostly for its subject matter, the stuff of geek discussions for decades. The source material, a ground breaking comic mini series that later was collected as a graphic novel, was called unfilmable and even by the most rabid fans was something that was thought to be best left to a cable serial and even then could only be expected to be presented in some watered down form.
I’m talking about Watchmen.
Describing the plot of Watchmen is difficult because in its shortest explanation, it’s misleading and any description that does it justice is better given by just handing someone the book. Trying to meet these challenges in the middle, I’ll try to summarize thusly: The Watchmen are a group of superheroes, only second group of their kind in a world very much like our own, at least up until the 1940’s in which the first group of superheroes became active. The Watchmen are mostly retired, forced to hang up their masks by an act of congress outlawing costumed vigilanttes. The members include:
- Nite Owl, a gadgeteer and idealist.
- Silk Spectre, a second generation crimefighter.
- The Comedian, who goes on to work black ops for the government.
- Rorschach, a nigh-psychopathic crusader who refused to retire.
- Dr. Manhattan, a former physicist given godlike powers who works for the government on scientific projects even as he slowly is losing touch with his humanity.
In the first few minutes of the story, the Comedian dies. Rorschach investigates and starts tracking down his former team mates to warn them someone might be targeting heroes. As the members of the team come to grips with both who they are and who they were, a plot unfolds that may be either the key to ending… or starting… world war III.
The world of Watchmen is a rich one and has a steep learning curve as we must accept in a glance that it’s the 80’s, Richard Nixon is still president and that America won in Vietnam. The director does an excellent job of summing this up in the opening credits, one of the best cinematic sequences of the film, but still there’s a lot for the viewer to take in with only a short mentions and glances to convey it.
The story, too, has a steep learning curve. This story doesn’t hold back or pull punches, presenting to us an attempted rape, graphic consensual sex, gruesome violence, nudity both male and female, all of which is used to immerse you in a time and place of moral greys, devoid of easy choices.
Watchmen provides a counterpoint to the ugliness in its world with very human characters with very understandable motivations, from Nite Owl’s struggle to overcome the mediocrity in his life as a retired superhero to a former supervillian struggling with the fact he’s dieing of cancer. The people we meet are extreme personalities, but their outlook seems appropriate given the extremes of the world in which they live. If you watch this movie, you will not like all of the characters, but you will get where they are coming from.
Visually, the movie is amazing, lifting images straight off the page and setting them in motion. The gritty streets, spotless boardrooms and warm-but-dull apartments each move the story along as much as the dialog, the plot or the more spectacular effects. Watchmen is as much an experience as a piece of cinema, something you must more surrender to than watch.
I was a fan of the book well before I saw the movie and while I was in the theater, this let me overlook some of the movie’s flaws. A couple of weeks later, I can see the holes in the work, from simple things like a character producing a gun that they had no reason to have to the moments in the dialog (mostly from Silk Spectre’s mom) that were not delivered as convincingly as they really could have been. There are moments whose signifigance goes unexplained, places where the pacing could be better and scenes where we get close ups when a short glimpse would have served just as well.
Watchmen is proving to be a commerical failure, which is sad because it’s a bold experiment and as edgy as movies get. It rivals Sin City and Pulp Fiction in it’s willingess to point you towards the unthinkable and not flinch. It rivals The Dark Knight in making the superhero acessable and real. It will be a movie that might be remembered for its brave choices if it is not overlooked for its spectacal.
For all its successes and all its failures, I give Watchmen a B. I’m not sure I’m ready to go back into the theater and watch it again, but I will be waiting eagerly for the DVD release and the eventual, inevitable extended cut. This is not a movie for everyone but is more than just a movie for the comic book geeks like me. It’s B movie subject matter with an A list budget and a script that I won’t even try to rate, because I don’t feel up to juding the classics.
