Watchmen (2009)
Watchmen (2009) 8/10
Watchmen is visually striking, and looks fantastic. The source material, one of the most famous graphic novels ever written gives the film its intellectual heft with its dark portrayal of deeply flawed heroes. It starts with a brilliant, near flawless opening sequence that evokes the feel of the comic and with the soundtrack of “The Times are A-Changin” neatly summarize so much of the history of an alternate reality world. It is the 1980s, Nixon is still President, America won Vietnam and is locked in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
But there is also so much that is wrong with the Watchmen that makes it such a great pity. It had the potential to be a great film, but settled to be only a good film. The labyrinthe plot was manageable even for a non-Watchmen fan like me. The voice over by Rorshach is jarring and could have been better done. Words that feel lyrical when read lose much of their power when spoken aloud.
The single biggest weakness of the film is its casting. Most of the leading characters are plain boring one dimensional cutouts. Therein lies the irony of Watchmen, whilst trying to break away from the typical mould of superheroes as paradigms of virtue, the film makes the mistake of creating simplistic one dimensional versions of these flawed heroes. Only Rorshach (Jackie Earl Haley) and the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bring their characters to life and make these believable characters. The rest of the cast fare much worse. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is actually a very interesting character whose detachment to life could make for a compelling and nuanced character. Unfortunately, for a demi-god, Dr Manhattan seems like a puerile, insecure entity that makes several mistakes in the film. For someone of such supposedly great powers, he seems really dumb. And yes, i know that the scene of Dr Manhattan leading US troops to Vietnam is most probably taken from the comic but he looks really dumb as a blue Sentinel like figure blasting random Vietcongs.
The Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) is such a plain vanilla character that if we deleted him from the movie, noone will probably care. Same for Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), who at least works as eye candy. Unfortunately she has zero chemistry with the rest of her love interests and simply plays a flower vase role. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) has so little screen time that he doesn’t even get a flashback to tell his life story unlike the rest of the cast.
The difference between a good film and a great film lies in the cast. The Dark Knight was a great film and starred top notch actors who could emote and convey anger, sorrow, pain and doubt. Between Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman and Christian Bale, The Dark Knight had an A-list cast of talents. The Watchmen seems to have spent all its budget on fancy effects because the cast with the exception of the Comedian and Rorshach put in bland performances and none of the characters feel particularly compelling.
The storyline is also affected by the need to cram everything into a movie and the film can be divided into 3 acts: Act 1 : Comedian is killed, cue flash backs; Act 2: Each of the major characters get a flashback to tell their past stories and histories; Act 3 OMIGOSH we actually have a plot to resolve so we conveniently put in a bad guy and the heroes through simple coincidences solve the mystery and go confront evil bad guy. Oh and by the way we also insert groovy Mars sequence since we still have money left over for CGI and the comic has it.
To be fair, the ending actually packs a punch and puts forth a moral question which actually makes it far better than a standard superhero movie. Plus as a bonus Dr Manhattan actually starts acting like a demigod in the last act instead of a bumbling doofus he has been for much of the film’s running time. Unfortunately, the “intellectual ending” has already been done in The Dark Knight, so it feels like a bit of deja vu.
There is also a lack of a good villian to balance the film. Every great superhero film has an equally great adversary to deal with. This is also why Heath Ledger’s joker is so damn fantastic. The villain in this film feels like an afterthought and the film suffers considerably because of this.
So to recap the GOOD POINTS: great visuals, nice CGI, strong source material, excellent 80s soundtrack, actually understandable even if you are not a watchman fan, Rorshach, the Comedian. The BAD: lousy acting by the rest of the cast, crammed plotline, unnecessarily long scenes (Mars sequence and any scene involving Silk Spectre 2 trying to be romantic), hardly any plot development for villain.
But even the uninspired casting cannot rob the strength of the original source material. The story that Alan Moore tells is a powerful tale and even when unnaturally compressed into its less than three hour running time the film still has its moments of brilliance.
Despite writing alot of negative stuff about the Watchmen, it is actually a very good film that is enjoyable and worth your time. However, this is precisely its problem: it is only a good film, when it could have been a great film. If i hadn’t watched The Dark Knight and seen what Nolan did with a superhero movie, i might have been more charitable. As it stands, while Watchmen is an entertaining flick and one of the better 2009 movies, it fails to realise its potential.
