Watchmen

When I saw Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, I called him a visionary. When I saw Zack Snyder's 300, I called him a moron. Upon seeing Zack Snyder's Alan Moore's 20th Century Fox's Warner Brother's Watchmen, I called Zack Snyder a visionary and a moron. Funny how these things tend to be circular.

Similarly, if you're a foamy-mouthed action junkie, Zack Snyder is the director for you. If you're a foamy-mouthed Watchmen fan, Zack Snyder is not the director for you. If you're a really foamy mouthed Watchmen fan and action junkie, your life just got really complicated.

I've seen the movie three times now, seeing as how it's my favorite book and it came out on the weekend of my birthday, everybody bought me tickets. Twice on a traditional screen and once on IMAX. So enough stalling, let's get down to it.

I believe there are two ideals clashing here. The visual, violence-tastic Snyder, and the wordy, purple Alan Moore. When those two ideals are at odds, the movie does not work. When they work harmoniously towards a better future, the movie replaces all your blood with adrenaline and your tears with sulfuric acid. There are also a few points where Zack Snyder says "fuck it, this movie needs more dudes getting their heads kicked in slow motion" and just adds some scenes. Like the opening scene, which, judged on its own merits, may be the best scene in the film.

As an action junkie, the only proper comparison I can think of is if an astronaut landed on a planet ruled by heavy metal demons from a castle made of pepper jack cheese and populated by women with ten boobs and the astronaut were crowned king. I could do an entire review of that one scene, so I'll spare you, dear reader. But let it be known that it rules.

The opening credits do a lot of leg work to make up for the film's short running time (yes, two hours and forty five minutes is fucking short for this movie--four hours would have been fine by me) at the same time as looking very pretty. Then the ball-squeezing keeps coming with Rorschach's opening scene. Every beat of that scene is kept to great effect and not one comma is changed of the original monologue, including the very-easily-taken-out-of-context "abattoir full of retarded children line".

Jackie Earl Haley's Rorschach is more perfect than I could have imagined. From the posture to the walk to the voice to the eyes of Walter Kovacs, he's perfect in every way. Somebody get this guy an Oscar.

Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg is good, not great. This is possibly the most difficult role in the book, and Patrick Wilson looks just like Dan, but his lines are not always great. He knows his place, though, and becomes sort of the temperate audience surrogate--the most relatable among the paranoid, psychopathic, mass-murdering and functionally retarded (that was referring to Laurie for anyone who didn't catch it) costumed vigilantes of the Watchmen universe.

Billy Crudup's Dr. Manhattan is also a good performance, but it could easily have been great, and as far as I can tell, this is Zack Snyder's fault. I think it's a good idea to keep the Doc's voice temperate and calm most of the time. He doesn't want to freak anyone out. But there are scenes where he DOES want to freak people out. Such as a particular scene at the end that had its balls cut off by Billy Crudup's wimper of a voice. But his Osterman is spectacular for the little time he gets. The Doc's origins is one of the best scenes in the film, tackling the dramatic possibilities of that scene's complex narrative perfectly.

Jeffery Dean Morgan's Blake is exceptional. Aside from looking just like Blake, he has the physicality and wild-eyed sociopathy to make us hate Blake, and then the terrified, broken interior to make us sympathize with him. The flashbacks, particularly the police riots (perfectly matched with KC and the Sunshine Band's I'm Your Boogie Man and some of the best speed-ramping in the film) are some of the best scenes of the film.

Matthew Goode's Adrian is bad. This is a role that plays itself. Aside from being a skinny little baby, he's too fucking young and doesn't have the voice or the presence for Adrian. If any part deserved a big star, it's this one. I'll come up with a list of random names and we'll see if they'd be better for the role than Matthew Goode:

- Tom Cruise
- Jude Law
- Robert Downey Jr.
- Meg Ryan

Look at that, all of them would have been better. Let's not pick on the poor guy any more, though, I hear he had a bit of a meltdown on the red carpet, crushed under the weight of his own bad performance.

But he's got nothing on Malin Akerman's Laurie. What a fucking disaster that performance was. I don't even want to go into it. It's like the script knew it would be terrible, too, because they took out the little "I'm looking for the dash lighter" thing when she nearly burns down the Owl's Nest, instead just searching for shiny buttons to push.

And, above all else, the ending has been ruined. I'm not complaining about the squid, I'm complaining about the lack of carnage, the lack of the everyday characters that we come to know and love in the book that die. The full extent of the act is lost without those things. There's no human face on the destruction.

I give it a 7/10, and I do so with tears in my eyes.