UPDATE II: Owing to the decent, if unspectacular, box office performance by WATCHMEN over the weekend – only $55 million or so – David Hayter, one of the movie’s screenwriters, has released an open letter to the world, outlining exactly why he thinks fans should go back and see the movie again this next weekend. Unfortunately, Mr. Hayter uses the worst analogy possible, writing that fans should return to the movie just as a rape-victim, Sally Jupiter, returns to The Comedian, the man who raped her. Let’s just say, all together now, “No, Mr. Hayter, you are an idiot, and you should be cornholed in a prison for making such an incredibly insensitive comparison. You don’t deserve our financial support, and now you deserve our contempt.” END.

UPDATE: Now with a WATCHMEN haiku -

When Zach Snyder asked,
“Will You Watch The Watchmen Please?”
Alan Moore said “No.”

REVIEW: I didn’t grow up reading comic books; I didn’t even know what Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN was until about three years ago. But reading the graphic novel was an eye-opening experience for me, even two decades after it was originally published. Moore dared to ask whether it was worth it to kill millions of people to save billions, a question not even the smartest man in the world is capable of answering.

Everything about Moore’s book – set in 1985, about costumed vigilante heroes in an alternate reality on the brink of nuclear annihilation – screams passionately. I have friends who say it’s a cold book emotionally, but every single one of the main characters believes deeply in some cause, and they act on it, at times with the cost of lives.

Seeing Zack Snyder’s cinematic interpretation, however, my reaction could be measured in tiny fractions, some up, some down, but nothing terribly passionate. Beware spoilers.

The acting is mixed. Jackie Earle Haley is fantastic as the psychotic Rorschach, bringing to life a character as extreme and dangerous as a city has ever brought into existence. Haley is the living, breathing embodiment of human fury, lashing out at a cold, heartless world full of people who just don’t care anymore. While certainly not as visceral, Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode, as Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, both turn in fine subdued performances in difficult roles. Crudup has the difficulty of playing a god, essentially, and the section that goes over his view of the universe is both haunting and beautiful, and it’s ripped right from the pages of the book with immense skill. Crudup’s role is the most interesting of Moore’s creation, conceptually, but Goode has possibly the hardest role. He is the smartest man in the world and the villain of the book, if we can call the man who saved the world from itself a villain. Goode brings such confidence and suave style to the role, and his disdain for his fellow heroes feels both real and deeply saddening. Also meriting mention, as all the main cast members do, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson are both solid in their roles as The Comedian and Nite Owl II. The oddity here is how average Malin Akerman is as Silk Specter II, and how bad Carla Gugino is when playing the old Silk Specter I (she’s great as the younger version). Gugino is an excellent actress and deserves better writing (and old person make-up) than this. Akerman, I couldn’t say whether she’s any good or not. Her line reading is stiff and her lines are stiffer.

For the most part, I can’t fault the look of the film. Snyder has created a stunning opening sequence introducing us to the alternate reality – many are even calling it the movie’s highlight – and he has recreated shots and settings from the book with a minute attention to detail. Set pieces, especially the clockwork mechanism on Mars, are simply a wonder to behold. Others, like the secret base in Antarctica, are a bit of a disappointment.

The direction, of course, has its ups and downs as well. Snyder knows damn well, as he showed us so well in 300, how to stage a fight scene. When Silk Specter and Nite Owl take down a gang of thugs in the street or Rorschach escape from a burning building, the action positively jumps from the screen. You can’t help but marvel, partially because Snyder’s toned down his patented-slow-mo fights. But when it comes to dramatic scenes – to dialogue, really – Snyder hasn’t a clue. Scenes play flat and unemotional. Actors look lost when they have to speak. Supposedly, all this is intentional, as Snyder was attempting to recreate panels from the book. Big mistake, if it was; bad direction, if it wasn’t. Snyder also has a tendency for showing off blood and guts in the extreme, often overdoing it. We know the comic is violent, but how many shattered bones and sawed-off limbs are necessary? How much dripping blood do we need? Really, at times it felt like I was watching Saw VIII: With Capes. The thing is, I know Snyder has a lot of guts for taking on crazily ambitious projects; I’m just not convinced he’s that good of a director yet.

The musical cues I’ll also blame on Snyder. These have got to be some of the worst pop song placements in recent memory, at least since Meet the Spartans. Snyder inserts enormously well-known songs, like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower, in the most ridiculous scenes. Most memorably, Cohen’s touching song plays during a bad sex scene aboard Nite Owl’s flying ship, a scene that plays so badly, you can’t imagine it even being part of such a serious movie. Or any movie, ever. At all. It’s that laughable. He should have stuck with the score, which is perfectly fine everywhere else.

Seeing this as an adaptation, I felt there were many things that Snyder got right. The complicated story structure, the aforementioned Dr. Manhattan Mars Sequence, the morally muddy area occupied by all these characters (with a special mention of no sugar-coating the Comedian’s shameful acts), and the pitch-black question of “the end justify the means” of its finale – these all work outstandingly well, and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse, along with Snyder for fighting the studios, deserve a huge amount of credit for maintaining the look of the comic, its ambiguity, its serious questions about heroism. All that is in here, and it’s a miracle that the comic emerged so unscathed. Yet, there were still a few problems, when you look at the film for what it is, a film, especially the dialogue and the climactic scenes in Antarctica. There’s no doubt in Ozymandias. Not really. And no one could ever make such a decision – except maybe Dr. Manhattan – without feeling a tinge of self-doubt. The same goes for the lack of carnage at the end. We don’t see the real consequences of Ozymandias’ actions, despite all the blood and guts shown earlier. Such omissions make it harder to buy into the emotional reality of the characters, and these scenes were part of the comic. They just weren’t included in the epic film.

The altered ending is the film’s most problematic touch. In the comic, Ozymandias engineers a huge psychic squid to teleport into the center of New York, wiping out 3 million people, but in the process, bringing peace to the world through a united struggle against an alien threat. In the film, however, Ozymandias frames Dr. Manhattan, setting off huge explosions of energy with Dr. Manhattan’s signature in a number of cities around the world. This is meant to rally the world around the new enemy, Dr. Manhattan, and thus bring peace to the world. But this changes the whole dynamic. Dr. Manhattan fought for America for years. Why would the world not be furious with the US for creating him, keeping him, and encouraging him? Why would the world not turn on the US unilaterally and then deal with the Dr. Manhattan problem? The key with the giant squid-alien threat, as weird as it is in the comic, is that the danger was external and unknown, and that’s what unites us as a world. Also, I just really wanted to see a giant squid blow up in New York.

At over two-and-a-half hours long, WATCHMEN is such a mixed bag of wonder and missed opportunities, but if you’re a fan of the book, you must go see it. Go support this film, despite its uneven quality. The fact that Hollywood created a movie so dark and morally ambiguous should be applauded, even if they had to dress up a famous graphic novel in lipstick to do it.