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Watch The Watchmen
Selfy from ,
8th March, 2009
So, it's finally here. After years in development hell, Zack Snyder finally delivers his take on Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel. It's taken me two whole days to digest this movie, and I'm still wrestling with it. All I really know is this. I love it. Yet this is one that's going to plague me for a dozen repeat viewings - because I'm still trying to work out why I love it. Calling it 'the Citizen Kane of superhero films' is a little rich. About halfway through I turned to a friend whom I watched it with and said 'This is the There Will Be Blood of superhero films.' Actually, I said 'This is There Will Be Blood with blue willies' but you get the point. The film's pace is one entirely of its own and I can fully see the criticism of it's too long, it's slow, it's episodic. It is all of those things, yes, but I never felt any of those were negatives. The traditional three act structure is negligable, too - the film feels very much like consuming the graphic novel in a single sitting. High points? Where to begin. Well - at the beginning, with the astounding titles sequence set to Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A Changin' - a six minute sequence of real-life comic book tableau's and vignettes detailing the history of this alternate world that deftly sets up tone and character clues. Indeed, the music choices throughout give texture to the world and often combine to leave lasting impressions - Simon and Garfunkel's Sound Of Silence played over The Comedian's rainsoaked funeral; Philip Glass' Pruit Igoe & Prophecies scoring the flawless sequence detailing Doctor Manhattan's perception of time and exhile on Mars; Hendrix' All Along The Watchtower mirroring it's use in the book as Nite Owl and Roarscach pay the final visit to Antarctica. Performances are uniformly excellent, subtle and nuanced in all the right places. Patrick Wilson's plays Nite Owl as the aging boyscout who always genuinely wanted to be a superhero and had it taken away from him. Malin Ackerman's Silk Spectre is a girl who never grew up, a surprising and believable take on the character. Billy Crudup's Dr Manhattan is austere, serene and stilted, having pretty much given up on the need for human communication, reflected in his voice and movements. Only Matthew Goode's Ozymandias doesn't quite hold up - he's a little too effete and distant at times, but he brings it when he has to. The standouts are Jackie Earle Haley's Roarshach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian. The film's darker characters, both are sociopaths of a different breed. Roarschach is the son of a prostitute, led down dark paths during his life and finally forged during a missing-child investigation, an event that flips a switch in his mind and sets his moral compass to black and white, pure and simple. Evil is evil, crime is crime, and all must be punished - one broken finger and meat-cleaved head at a time. Haley makes the character utterly convincing and terrifying, and you're constantly left in the uncomfortable state of having to decide whether he's right or wrong. Much of the film is spent with him masked, but once it comes off in prison and you finally get a look in those eyes, no matter how brief, Haley sells every moment. Morgan, likewise, brings an odd humanity to a murdering rapist, particularly in the scene where he spills his heart out to a former enemy. Changes? Yes, there are some, but none that I feel detract from the experience. In fact, and this sentiment was mirrored by several of those I saw the film with, the new ending to the film feels like an improvement over the book. It makes greater thematic sense, gives more character resolution and dammit, the squid was just plain daft. The outcome isn't different, but the means are. Problems? The only thing that bugged me was the unnecessarily cheesy sex scene, which caused more titters than tittilation amongst the audience. Scored to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, it's a late-night soft core rub fest that I can see the intention of - to show the fetishistic nature of dressing up in latex, while offering a potent payoff for a character - but it didn't need as much bare-ass thrusting. The other 'problem' with the film is that it's so staggeringly uncommercial that I would be totally unsurprised if this flopped. Non-fans of the book are going to have a difficult time absorbing so much information because it doesn't offer the standard tropes of the genre - there are very few action sequences, the heroes are flawed, the moral outcome foggy and ambivalent. The film, much like the graphic novel, offers up the story and says 'That's it. Now deal with it.' And that's where I am now. Dealing with it. I've never had a film experience quite like this - and I know this will be a film I treasure each repeat viewing of, dissecting it and deciding what each scene means. It feels like a multi-layered complex experiment, and I love it all the more for it. Chances are I'll back with a new review every time I see it.
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