He’s probably the ideal symbol of Zack Snyder’s latest film, the much anticipated and aggressively promoted comic book epic, Watchmen. Rorschach the paranoid, sociopathic id that drives the action in the comic series, excuse me, graphic novel, provides the litmus test of reviewers. What you bring to the film, you see in the visuals on screen. A cinematic inkblot.
Fanboys, including the crew at AICN, are trending toward the positive, exulting the fidelity and reveling in the depiction of their beloved. “Serious” movie critics and clearly non-fanboys like NPR’s Kenneth Turan and the NY Times’ A.O. Scott find the film interminable and too faithful to the source material. Worse, they deem it a poor film. It may well be, but Scott in particular rips what he perceives the “ideal viewer” of the film:
[A] mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.
He would also no doubt have been stirred by the costumes of the female superheroes — Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman, both gamely giving solid performances — who sensibly accessorize their shoulder-padded spandex leotards with garter belts and high-heeled boots. And the dense involution of the narrative might have seemed exhilarating rather than exhausting.
I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie. I wouldn’t, though it is certainly better than the same director’s “300.” But it’s possible to imagine that our imaginary student would at least have found some food for thought in Mr. Snyder’s grandiose, meticulously art-directed vision of blood, cruelty and metaphysical dread. As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.
It drips with condescension, doesn’t it? Turan of course wouldn’t get the source material; he was forty when Watchmen came out. Scott, on the other hand, was a junior literature major at Harvard for most of Watchmen’s original run. I’m not sure why I find that so curious, but I do. His cultural connection to the material should be stronger, having grown up in the terrifyingly turbulent and in retrospect magnificent 80s.
Those college sophomores of Mr. Scott’s hypothetical are now grown up. They came of age in an era about which James Lileks once remarked, “There was a lot of bummery in the 80s about stuff like that, if you were of a sensitive mind. It was very hard really at the time, to watch movies like The Day After which was sort of presented as a documentary…and to simultaneously plan for your future…It was interesting how you had to live in both mindsets.” The dark, anti-hero aspects of the society depicted is a refreshing reminder of the acidic counterpart to the sugary eighties we quickly recall.
When I hear Turan this morning, or read Scott’s review, I understand their criticisms. They see comic books and the films they spawn the same way the current Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does – juvenile entertainments for juvenile minds. Chris Nolan shattered that paradigm last year. Frank Miller attempted (unintentionally) to restore it. I want to believe Snyder hopes his film continues to push the comic book movie closer to respectability by infecting the genre with deeper themes and darker characters. Will it win over critics? Of course not. It’s not meant to. Its length and fidelity is meant to appeal to the insiders, the fanboys, who will celebrate the film.
I’m a partial fanboy. Still I find much appreciation for the critique Brent Simon expresses.
A lot of what made Watchmen a landmark achievement in the comic book realm — its imaginative density, philosophical grappling and embrace of different modes of storytelling, including faux primary documents — helps make the film feel bloated and unfocused. David Hayter and Alex Tse’s script seems faithful to a degree that handcuffs any substantive exploration of the chief narrative dilemmas, and the curious result is an exercise in tension-free antics and alt-noir styling.
The layered, nuanced story of the comics completely elevated the comic medium to genuine art. The depth of story alone makes maintaining the pacing of the series in a standard cinematic narrative arc problematic. Brent is right, but in his critique he is not shredding the fans. He’s sympathetic to them. I commented there that “perhaps the vision would have been better presented in its full form with each comic comprising some 45 minutes of stylized HBO series goodness.” Still having not seen it, I’ll stand by that assessment. The geek in me is still delighted the film was made at all.
Placing Watchmen in the proper contextual comic continuum requires a brief temporal displacement. The series appeared right after Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel mini-series. It’s 12 month run was marketed aggressively by DC, with the ubiquitous smiley face and the tag-line, “Who Watches the Watchmen.” Over at Marvel at the time, Tony Stark was fighting the armor wars, the X-Men were king and Peter Parker was getting married. Business as usual. DC was embracing the more serious aspirations of comics. In many ways it was Miller and Alan Moore who propelled comics toward sincere theatrical consideration. Shortly afterward, Tim Burton brought a serious Batman project to theaters, and comic-book movies have been box-office staples since.
The enduring affection for Watchmen is the result of a number of its readers, my age plus or minus a few years, growing up aware that comic books were not the biff! pow! nonsense that they were for our dads and uncles. They had grit and the situations contained, while fantastical, also had a grounding in reality. Actions had consequences. The use of powers never occurred in a vacuum, except in space, of course. But most of all, comics could have deep meanings, that frequently did resonate with us.
Based on the smattering of reviews I’ve read, the fans are gonna love it. Newcomers, not so much. In that sense it fails to continue where The Dark Knight began. Whether it succeeds as a film, I’ll have to let you know after I see it.
