“Watchmen” (2009) completes a spiritual trilogy of standout graphic novel adaptations in the Aughts – along with “Sin City” (2005) and “V for Vendetta” (2006) – in which we feel like we’re watching comic panels come alive on the screen.
By a slight margin, “Watchmen” is the least effective of the three because it juggles so many big ideas and it lends itself to an “Ending Explained” video more than the others. But it’s never anything less than engrossing as it adapts the 1986-87 comic series by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins.
Superheroes above the law
I thought director Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen” would be kind of like “The Dark Knight Returns” graphic novel – a critique of the flag-waving 1980s, in which “right and wrong” are supplanted by “for or against the American government’s actions.”
“Watchmen” (2009)
Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Dave Gibbons, David Hayter, Alex Tse
Stars: Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino
There is some of that. The spray-painted phrase “Who watches the Watchmen?” – a critique of superheroes being above the law (and a real-world metaphor for people in power being above the law) – pointedly applies to Edward/The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Negan on “The Walking Dead”).
Not much of a hero even in his prime, when he was attempting to rape fellow Watchman Sally/Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), the Comedian opens fire on citizens partying in the street and breaking curfew during a police strike. He’s protecting the citizens “from themselves,” he explains to Dan/Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), although even that lame rationalization is probably just an excuse. He admits he sees life as a joke.
The story – written by David Hayter and Alex Tse — is told out of order, with flashbacks focusing on the six individual Watchmen, probably mirroring the source material. But the Comedian’s gunning down of street partiers might be among the reasons why President Nixon – on his fifth term in this alternate 1985 – outlaws superheroes.
Going against what I’d expect, Nixon isn’t a flat-out villain here, and indeed anything he does to rein in killers is hard to quibble with. Indeed, it’s something the Comedian’s fellow Watchmen fail to do. Dan just kind of shakes his head in shame at his colleague’s behavior. The Watchmen’s failure to self-govern will in fact become the movie’s overarching theme, once we learn what Adrian/Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) has been up to all along.
Big stakes, intimate character studies
However, “Watchmen” is broader than supervillains springing from groups of superheroes who fall asleep at the wheel. I can’t let this fictional Nixon entirely off the hook, because he’s in the same boat as the actual 1980s present, Ronald Reagan, in that he’s overseeing a Cold War against the USSR – and often seeming helpless to do anything about it.
I’m impressed with how “Watchmen” has fate-of-mankind stakes while spending a lot of its time – to its credit – in the “Sin City”-esque world of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley). Rorschach’s journal entries serve as hardboiled voiceovers as he investigates who is killing retired members of the Watchmen. (After the Comedian is killed, a hired gun takes a crack at Ozymandias.)
At the same time, there are good thinking points here about the question of how to stop nuclear annihilation. Ozymandias, who has become rich off the marketing of his superhero image, says he is close to finding a source of free energy. If all the world’s citizens have access to free and unlimited resources, there will be no more wars, he theorizes. (I’m not so sure about that.)
At any rate, that’s a fake-out. As we learn in the final showdown between Watchmen of conflicting ideologies at Ozymandias’ Antarctica HQ, Ozymandias was actually funding research into making a bomb that will mimic the powers of nuclear man Jon/Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, whose soft, disconnected speeches are a nice contrast to Rorschach’s rough ones). He unleashes this bomb on New York and other major cities, killing millions.
The ending of “Watchmen” is unpredictable (which is good) and confusing (which isn’t so good), but I think I get it: By thinking Dr. Manhattan is a god who will punish them if they move toward war again, Earth governments will behave. It’s peace via threat, which Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan think is the only possible solution, and which Dan, Rorschach and Laurie/Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) believe is unconscionable.
A lot packed into the run time
“Watchmen” is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, and it packs a lot into that time. Until the complex ending, it lets us wallow in various offshoots of the main threads, mostly in a good way. The romance between Dan and Laurie is the only “we know where this is going” element, although even that is pretty good.
Rorschach’s story is my favorite: He ends up in prison, surrounded by people he helped put in there. But in comic-book wish fulfillment mode, he ends up proving that they are all trapped in there with him, not the other way around. The film isn’t particularly gory, but the scene of one baddie sawing off a colleague’s arms to get a crack at Rorschach during a prison melee is memorable.
“V for Vendetta” is pointedly about a rebellion against an oppressive state, and “Sin City” stays in the gutters of the crime underworld. “Watchmen” can’t be pinned down in one sentence, so I have a hard time saying it’s a crisp treatise on a specific topic.
Depending on your point of view, it skirts over the “Who watches the Watchmen?” theme or repositions the question on a larger scale and answers “They watch themselves, but the good ones don’t stop the bad ones, so effectively, no one watches them.”
The hero-turned-villain’s answer to the world’s perpetual wars is peace-via-threat, and the price tag is millions of innocent lives. That’s not satisfying, but nor is it supposed to be. Still, for all the muddled feelings “Watchmen” evokes by the end, there’s no denying it looks fantastic, it’s engaging to watch, and, after all, not all great movies have a theme that can be contained to a nutshell.