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Wry Subversion and Lazy Conventions

Watchmen tells its story poorly, and it tells it in the wrong register. The book's attitude is knowing but mocking -- it's both an homage to and a cutting satire of superhero comics that asks some very clear-eyed questions about why anybody would dress up to fight crime. The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a monstrous rapist, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) a murderous psychopath.

Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) get turned on by their outfits and late-night rooftop escapades. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is so powerful he doesn't actually care about people. The book's wry subversion of genre expectations undermines its exciting showdowns with our increased understanding of the hero's unsavory motivations.

Deaf to the book's sardonic tone, the film instead partakes in the laziest conventions of the typical superhero flick. Snyder sexes up every scene in every conceivable way: swelling musical cues, slow motion, over-dramatic angles. Every line is delivered for maximum impact, every mundane moment milked for maximum awesomeness. A fire rescue that, in the book, is notable precisely for its ordinariness now features a Gatling gun and cinematic explosions. John Higgins' bright coloring has been severely darkened for the film, and the book's already graphic violence has been turned up considerably -- grimness and an R rating have to stand in for real depth.

Maybe this stylistic overkill was to be expected from the director of 300, but at least it was appropriate for Frank Miller's bloody visons of Sparta.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Then there are the songs. Whenever yet another boring conversation scene looms, Snyder reaches for the next best pop song. "99 Luftballons" because it's the eighties, Simon & Garfunkel, and naturally, some Bob Dylan because that was in the book. When almighty Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) gives a speech, it's "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." The madness culminates in a campy soft core sex scene that has to be seen in all its jaw-dropping badness to be believed: late night audiences are going to laugh at Night Owl ravishing Silk Spectre to the strains Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" for years to come.

Occasionally, taken on its own, some of the set-pieces do work. The origin of Dr. Manhattan, scored with a Philip Glass track from "Koyaanisqatsi," is effective because he's the only character with actual superpowers, and the bombast resonates. When Dr. Manhattan single-handedly wins the Vietnam War, Snyder cues Wagner because, hey, Apocalypse Now!

Vainglory

Watchmen is not a story about triumphant heroes; it's about their vainglory and ultimate futility. Dr. Manhattan's Vietnam victory completes his transformation into a military asset. In a bitter twist, it's the story's villain who finally brings peace to the world and the most uncompromising hero threatens to destroy it -- or is it the other way around? The thematic thrust of the book -- "Who watches the Watchmen?" -- relates to Cold War era fears of atomic annihilation. Those fears have been replaced, but aside from a few half-hearted shots of the World Trade Center, Synder's film doesn't try to reimagine the book's themes for our radically changed cultural and political landscape.

Moore's Watchmen revealed the intrinsically questionable nature of the masked vigilante and permanently altered the DNA of the genre. The formal innovations prepared us for the diagram-like layouts of Chris Ware, and the devastating deconstruction of the superhero inoculated me against the pretensions of The Dark Knight and the creeping fascism of Superman Returns. (The Spider-Man and X-Men franchises work precisely because they respect the limits of the genre.)

A Swift Kick in the Spandex Pants

Ultimately, exploding the limits of what a comic book can do is what Watchmen is about. The ways in which the comic uses the medium's unique properties to tell a story were not just incidental -- they were the point. Watchmen delivered a powerful argument about the potential of the comic book and the future of superheroes circa 1986.

The tragedy is that the American film industry circa 2009 could have used an effective adaptation of Watchmen. With superhero franchises multiplying like mushrooms, a movie that successfully delivered a swift kick in the spandex pants would have been most welcome. But instead of a withering look at the limitations and the unexplored frontiers of the genre, Snyder's bloated film only furthers the devolution into self-satisfied kitsch. The subtext of Alan Moore's Watchmen was "look at all you can do with a comic book." Robbed of its raison d'etre, the film's subtext is "Whoa, we finally made a movie out of Watchmen. Isn't it awesome?!

Watchmen (2009)

Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Carla Gugino
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Running Time: 2 hrs. 43 min.