K and I went to see Watchmen, Zack Snyder's adaptation of the popular comic books, on Tuesday night, because she was excited about it and I was willing to go despite the hashing that the film's been getting from all the critics. After all, we have this great moviehouse (I'm calling it a "moviehouse" because it feels very quirky and '30s of me to do so) downtown where you can see first-run films for only $3.50 ($2.50 for matinees), and also, I figured that since Snyder is also responsible for 300, it would at least be a great-looking movie: Worst case scenario, I could sit and zone out to bright colors and stunning cinematography for three hours.
Dude, I was so wrong. Watchmen is a huge, lumbering mess of a movie, a leviathant whose flashy, big-budget special effects can't reconcile themselves to the BIG, DEEP, MEANINGFUL THEMES portrayed in the comic; in fact, the two often seem at blatant odds with each other. Plus, there's simply too much of everything in this film for any of it to have an impact.
Watchmen takes place in the year 1985, only it's an alternate 1985 in which Richard Nixon has just been elected to his third term and the US and USSR are perilously close to all-out nuclear war. The whole shebang is narrated by Rorshach, who's a superhero of your "I'm crazy, and that's what makes me super!" variety, a raspy-voiced, sweat-sock masked, conservative-minded vigilante whose "journal" is filled with dead dogs in gutters, lamentations on humanity's filthy and unworthiness, et al. He's also bitter as hell that he's the only one still keeping up with the superhero thing; it turns out that Rorshach was part of a group called Watchmen, a coalition of heroes dedicated to keeping the world from going entirely batshit. Now, somebody's launched a plot to take out the remaining members of this coalition.
And that's really about all I got out of the plot, per se: This movie is so jam-packed with plots and subplots and backstories and commentary on current politics, that it's hard to see the main plot, let alone figure out who the characters really are or care about them, for that matter. It's epic but not meaningful, splashy but without real impact, and comes across as being jumbled and disjointed. Case in point? The film's score utilizes songs from Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Simon & Garfunkel, which I'm sure is supposed to "mean" something but mostly just makes you wonder: Do Hendrix and Dylan actually exist in this parallel world, or are we breaking the fourth wall, here?
Also-- if you're offended by repeated full-frontal shots of nuclear, possibly cancer-causing blue dick, definitely don't bother seeing this movie.
L-Scale Grade (out of a possble 5 Ls): L 1/2
19 March, 2009
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