Watchmen (Yes, Spoilers)

Saw ‘Watchmen’ (dir. Zack Snyder) last night at the IMAX. Scroll on by if you don’t want spoilers– though given the structure of the story and the movie, knowing what happens does not really matter. There is no suspense that will be ruined by previous knowledge of plot twists or character choices. The overwhelming verdict on this film: bizarre.

There are so many similarities to Generation Kill: the story follows a group of (mostly, in ‘Watchmen’s case) men who are powerful, on the frontlines of a moral, spiritual, literal war, and whose behaviour at times veers into the represensible, the horrific, the unconscionable. Generation Kill navigates that space between sympathy and revulsion with grace and subtlety, ‘Watchmen’– doesn’t quite get there. There is absolutely nothing wrong with confronting and depicting the humanity’s dark underbelly, it’s sewers filled with blood, but ‘Watchmen’ gives the impression, at times, that it doesn’t realise how horrifying the characters and viewpoints its depicting are, and that’s a problem.

I felt like the film was trying to rewrite my psychosexual map. An orgy of sexdeath, all primal urges and primary colours, travelling across the screen too quickly to create any lasting, discrete impressions but meant to leave you sickened and stimulated. But that’s the issue: it presents all of these moral problems and issues, it’s hardhitting, but too in love with itself, with its own gleaming and slow-mo and camerawork and exploitative costuming to actually allow the audience any critical distance. All of the dizzyingly multiple viewpoints and murky morality and deliberate internal contradiction aren’t exposed or discussed or even given any space to breathe. It’s all too visceral. It becomes a slick and desensitised platform for the very thing that the story and the graphic novel are critiquing and problematising.

The film is like someone trying to engage you in socratic dialogue while you’re in a car crash, you might remember some of the words and the tone but your overall impressions are just: speed, and blood, and metal-on-metal and possibly your own screaming.

The grandiosity and sheer size of the IMAX screen certainly magnifies this, but this is a story written and visualised for the IMAX canvas. It’s calculated to feel epic and spanning, an entire alternate history crammed in to two-and-a-half hours. The revved up and updated version of this alternate America is where the film really succeeds. It takes the spirit of Alan Moore and fulfils it in a way that’s modern and accessible. The opening montage was one of the best sequences of the film, managing to set up the older generation of Watchmen, the fundamental alterations the presence of such ‘supermen’ had created in our history, our pop-cultural psyche, our world and then setting up the ‘next generation’ and their skewed reality with savvy sepia-tinted shorthand.

Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ thrumming underneath this is one of the soundtrack choices that works. The fact that it’s big and brash and well-known works for the nostalgia of this montage, all scratchy voices and camera-flashes and big hair. But that’s where the soundtrack stops making sense. I’m not talking about the original score– it’s the use of famous, pop-culture heavy songs that is weird. ‘Boogie Man’, ‘Unforgettable’, ‘All Along the Watchtower’: songs that have been used, in many cases used iconically in other films jarred us right out of the film and into the territory of postmodern pastiche. Alan Moore’s graphic novel is peppered through with song-references but I think the film interpreted it a bit too literally. Quoting lyrics has a different effect to setting a fight sequence to ‘Boogie Man’. The cheap thrill, quick-grin it evinced wasn’t worth the cost: instead of immersing it alienated & distanced.

It felt like the film couldn’t bring itself to actually express any opinions or feelings or emotions, and when it veered towards emotion it either undercut itself with a self-conscious, self-deprecating laugh (see: Dan/NiteOwl II and Laurie’s sex scene in Archie set to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, played for semi-pornographic, soft-focus, lingering-orgasm laughs when it should have been something hopeful, fertile in a deadened landscape) or abandoned all restraint (see: The Comedian’s funeral scene, haunting images paired with Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’: lovely song but incredibly on-the-nose, overused and over-the-top in this context, rocketing so far past subtle that it ended up quasi-ironic; a moving moment that elicited sniggers).

Tone was the big weakness. The gritty, hardcore, surrealism of the fight sequences and Vietnam war and subtle, unpleasant, rough-edged performances of the Watchmen themselves– standouts James Earle Haley as Rorschach, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian, and Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan– did not match with the pantomime performance of Nixon and the war cabinet. (Not just the nose that seemed to have come straight from the set of ‘The Hours’, and Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf, but the scripting and stark camera angles which were as one-dimensional as the performance). The film began interrogating the superhero movie but as time went on ended up as one, in a pyramid in Antarctica and monologuing (lampshaded monologuing, but monologuing nonetheless). The last sequence is more pantomime than anything else, and not even the film managing to find an emotional core: in Rorschach’s last conversation with Dr. Manhattan, unwilling to compromise, putting forward the best case for humanity that the film’s got. I’m not sure whether it’s ironic or fitting that the most human, sympathetic exchange occurs between a blue naked guy who’s on the brink of cutting ties with humanity and moving to another galaxy, and a misogynistic, reactionary sociopath that freely admits that his human self is dead and that all that’s left is his ever-shifting mask.

Which is the thing: ‘Watchmen’ engages us in the struggle for humanity’s survival, but to bastardise Dr. Manhattan, why should we care about a world that we have no stake in? It’s a film about saving the world centred around characters that are alienated from and at odds with it, seemingly for good reason. There is nothing good or redeemable or worthwhile about the vision of humanity that the film gives us. Laurie/Silk Spectre II says, ‘do it for me’, and Dr. Manhattan (bewilderingly) agrees but if it were up to me, the earth would be a smoking crater. Dr. Manhattan is a great character, and Billy Crudup (and the visual effects team) injects him with just enough humanity to be engaging and just enough galaxy-eyed, time-skipping vacancy to be deeply disturbing– but his relationship with Laurie is lacking in chemistry and interest. Unfortunate, as the film is at pains to stress, it’s his ‘last link’ to humanity, and our link to the emotional core of the film. Malin Akerman’s performance as Laurie is weak and unconvincing, but then, the character she’s given is too. She doesn’t have any agency, but she has high heels. I think her haircut’s the bravest thing about her.

For a film that embraces its characters as marketing phenomenons, as images and appearances and action figurines and masks rather than real people it’s astonishingly naive about its images of women. The closest it comes to acknowledgement is Laurie’s joke to Dan about her ‘awful’ tight costume, as we cut back to a sexy shot of it and Dan coughs and mumbles, ‘yeah, awful’, which I guess is supposed to voice the thoughts of millions of fanboys the world over. Let’s forget the insult to the film’s fan-boys and girls alike. Which, yes, okay, but surely this is indicative a missed opportunity to update some of the graphic novel’s outdated assumptions and display a bit more awareness? (See: treatment of entire Sally Jupiter/The Comedian/Junior Jupiter plotline)

We’re supposed to feel superior and knowing and modern when the Comedian spouts his old-fashionedly sexist and menacing ‘there’s a reason you dress like that’ before his interrupted attempt to rape Sally Jupiter, but are we? The shots just preceding this scene are low-angle, kind of upskirt. The scene of violence is deliberately titillating, her bloodied face, her specifically and provocatively positioned body. I think it’s meant to challenge and discomfit, but again, I think, in a film this big and packed and fast, it just doesn’t quite manage it. Leaving that aside, just to play the numbers game, of all the women with speaking parts, how many of them aren’t called whores? (My single-watching running tally: Sally Jupiter, Laurie Jupiter, Rorschach’s mother– who actually is a prostitute, Silhouette– who has the word daubed in blood over her lifeless body, and that of her lover) The only two I could think of were Janey Slater– Manhattan’s ‘old girl’, who’s a spurned, paid off faux-cancer victim in collusion with Veidt– and Eleanor Clift the real-life tv pundit played by Mary Ann Burger, who is sent-up. I’m just scratching the surface of the problems with representation (of gender, race, sexuality) here. Frankly, I just don’t know how nobody noticed that the film keeps talking about ‘masks’ and masked superheroes but none of the female Minutemen/Watchmen actually wore masks.

I do not think ‘Watchmen’ is a bad film. Not at all. Despite many of these issues and others I found it watchable, and certainly interesting. It’s clever, and beautifully shot, and there’s a lot of meat, a lot of implication and visual resonance and smart, effective performances and some clear-eyed editing choices in moving the book from graphic novel to film (some plotlines have been ruthlessly cut out, for the best, I think) but those clever choices nestle alongside some genuinely baffling ones.

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Aside: the Star Trek trailer that played before the film looked great. I was a bit surprised at the racy bits, and the Kirk v. Spock bits, but I can get behind some kitschy ‘I am James Tiberius Kirk!’ action anyday.