Intentionally Avoiding a Pun on "Watching the Watchmen"

Or maybe not. ;-)

So anyway, what's my verdict? Pretty damn awesome is my verdict. Not perfect, but pretty damn awesome. This is a movie made by fans of the graphic novel, for fans of the graphic novel. Whether or not anyone else will appreciate it is open to debate, but I certainly proved to myself that I'm more of a fangirl than a critic when it comes to this particular adaptation. So let me see if I can write this review as a fangirl rather than a critic, and tell you some things that you won't hear anywhere else. I'll start with some observations that are appropriate for anyone who might want to see the movie, regardless of whether or not they've read the graphic novel, then follow with a bracketed spoiler section for those who've read the graphic novel and who have heard about the change to the ending. If you skip that section, do stop back in at the bottom of this entry for a few final thoughts. ;-)

Okay, first of all Jackie Earle Haley rocked my world...and Patrick Wilson gently set it back on its axis.

Now, Rorschach is such a meaty character to begin with that I can imagine a number of fine actors who might have nailed the part. But Haley is a particularly fine actor, and his non-movie-star looks work to special advantage here. Plus, he's got that great underdog/comeback-kid story going for him in real life. I was primed to root for him from the start, and he absolutely did not disappoint. His final scene, in particular, will hit you like a punch to the gut. And the prison scenes - hoo boy. Haley is 100% convincing as a brilliant, badass psychopath.


As for Patrick Wilson, he's one of those challenge-taking character actors who don't rely on their good looks, and I've been enjoying him for years in a number of widely divergent roles. Here, he's nicely nerded-up for the early scenes, then masterfully demonstrates how thoroughly a cool costume changes Dan's Dreiberg's persona. The image at left (borrowed from an io9 page stuffed with similar joke Watchmen products, the most hilarious of which is too spoilery to post here) conveys that perfectly. Wilson is the kind of actor who can turn even a simple line about why he named the owl-ship "Archie" into a rich display of character. Damn, I love that man...in a totally platonic way, of course. ;-)

Billy Crudup, too, is his usual awesome self. I like the fact that his Dr. Manhattan voice is still that of the science geek he used to be, for all that he looks like a blue-glowing god with a body that would reduce Conan to jealous tears. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is great as the Comedian, too, capturing him in all his gleefully sadistic, nihilist glory. And Carla Gugino blazes across her limited screen space. Her big scene with the Comedian plays out exactly as it should.

But the other two key players, I'm afraid, are tragically weak links. Matthew Goode is every bit as shallow and foppish as I was afraid he'd be: very definitely not "smartest man in the world" material. Plus, someone really should have hired that boy a dialect coach (assuming they had to hire him to begin with. Damn, they really should have spent the money they saved on special effects to get Jude Law). He can't hold onto an American accent to save his life. Why didn't they just let him use his natural English accent to begin with? After all, it would be just one more bit of stereotyping for a character that the movie already stereotypes too heavily to begin with. Yeah, the graphic novel hints that Ozymandias' sexual energies might not flow strictly AC, but - and let the record show I was the first to notice this Easter egg - not only does the onscreen character come across as moderately flaming, but there's a folder on his computer desktop labeled "boys."

And then there's Latex Laurie. *sigh* What a total fucking waste. Admittedly, Laurie is not the most riveting character in the graphic novel. But an actress of depth could have really done something with her, could have made her more than just "the girl." It absolutely boggles my mind that the same people responsible for casting Haley, Wilson and Crudup apparently just flicked through their résumés of available ingenues and stopped at the first one that said "will do nude scenes." They should have taken a harder look at the actress who played Janey Slater. Now, there was a woman with depth and charisma. I'll have to keep an eye out for her in future films. She did more with her little handful of scenes than Malin Akerman did with two hours and forty-some-odd minutes.

Still, aside from these two glaring character problems, the movie as a whole was excellent. From the moment the final trailer ended and the screen went solid yellow, I felt totally immersed in Alan Moore's alternate 1985 with its rich history of costumed vigilantes and its present of impending nuclear doom. Some reviewers have complained that they couldn't really buy into the threat that plays such a big role in the story because in our real world, the Cold War ended peacefully. To those reviewers I say, if you don't have enough imagination to buy into an alternate-reality story, then you've got no business reviewing it in the first place. Once again, this is a story by SF nerds, for SF nerds.

And I, being an SF nerd, totally bought into it. I imagine most of you have already heard about the fantastic Watchmen opening credits sequence. It sets up this world so perfectly, and condenses so much backstory into so little space. You can find it described in full elsewhere, so I won't go into much detail in this entry. I'll just tell you about my favorite little snippet which, once I buy the extended edition DVD with the "Black Freighter" and "Under the Hood" features and who knows what other goodies, I'll be rewatching and slow-motioning and pausing for days on end.

You know that famous old photograph taken during the celebration of the end of WWII, the one where the sailor dips a nurse backwards into a passionate kiss? Well, picture Silhouette stalking through that crowd of revelers like the proud dominatrix she is, spying the nurse, and closing in with a smirk. The nurse has just a moment to look startled, smitten, and helpless before Silhouette sweeps her into her shiny black arms. Mmmmmm. :-)

And now on to the spoiler section - but don't forget, if you skip this bit, to scroll down for some final parting thoughts.

[Okay, first, the filmmakers allayed my earlier worries about revealing Rorschach's identity too soon; they kept Haley hidden on the fringes of crowds or had him turned so that you couldn't see his face...except for one brief, scary moment in an alleyway. On the other hand, they made almost no effort whatsoever to hide the fact that Ozymandias is the true villain of the piece. He practically has "Bad Guy" tattooed across his forehead, and the fact that they've made him so obviously gay or bisexual just makes this fact even more frustrating. You've probably heard that Zach Snyder's previous film, 300, was both homoerotic and homophobic. Well, I sense some of that homophobia coming out again here - which is especially shameful when you think about all the parallels the graphic novel drew between costumed vigilantism and non-mainstream sexuality.

But I guess what you really want to know about is the change to the ending, eh? As my favorite pic at that io9 link above has it, "Squid not included." Did it matter? Ultimately, no. Let's face it: the squid in the graphic novel did make for several pages of outrageous Lovecraftian horror...but didn't it seem a little out of tune with the rest of the Watchmen universe? Okay, sure, Veidt wanted it to look like something that did come from another universe. But wasn't the whole concept of such a creature too over the top even for "the smartest man in the world" to come up with?

*shrug* I missed seeing the squid, and I thought the nuclear-holocaust-like devastation that replaced it was a bit underwhelming; but intellectually, it made sense, and it didn't change the outcome of the story. Besides, as Snyder has pointed out, keeping the squid would have required a lot of backstory about missing artists and decapitated dead psychics, and the movie already runs nearly three hours. Isn't it better to concentrate on the characters who really matter? Heck, even Hollis Mason's death got cut from the theatrical release, though it'll show up in the extended edition. If that didn't make it into the movie, then surely the shipful of bit characters who get blown to bits would have been a waste of film.]

And now back to spoiler-free territory with a couple of parting thoughts.

First, My Chemical Romance's cover of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" plays over the end credits. You might have heard it on the radio, too, or seen the fantastic video. MCR has punked it up just right, but unfortunately that means you can't really make out the lyrics without a cheat sheet. Now, Watchmen graphic novel fans know Alan Moore used a quote from "Desolation Row" as the title of one of his chapters: "At Midnight, All the Agents...." However, there's another line in the song that plays more clearly to my (and I presume your) personal fetishes:

Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants

There, isn't that lovely? :-) And I'll leave you with another lovely image: a rather ordinary-looking woman walking out of the theater at dusk after watching a movie about people who get off on having secret identities, getting off on the fact that no one around her knows her secret identity. Her smirk is clear for all the world to see, but no one can interpret it but her.