March 9, 2009
Are you a fan of Watchmen? Are you mildly interested in seeing how key scenes from the book translate to the big screen? Good, because that’s all you’re getting. You’ll get it in spades, mind. All the bits you remember are present and correct, generated with the best CGI money can buy. What this isn’t, at least, is some hideous Hollywood compromise with the Watchmen putting aside their differences to find and kill Osama bin Laden.
What you won’t get is any of the stuff that made Watchmen the classic that even those suspicious of the graphic novel grudgingly regard it as today. It’s a version of the book as a fifteen year old boy might read it – obsessing over the kung-fu fighting, mad science and hot chicks in leather while skipping the clever, touching grace-notes and excursions into the everyday world of adult human relationships that gives the original its depth. Everything is filmed at the hysterical, melodramatic pitch so wearyingly common to the modern blockbuster, making it impossible to care about anything or anyone on the screen.
This is true even in the nastiest and most disturbing scenes, of which there are many - the film’s loving attitude to violence and gore being as adolescent as its creepy approach to sex and sexuality.
Remote islanders, after their first experience of seeing planes land with supplies, would often build replica ‘airfields’ – flattening out runways, lining them with torches, even enacting ‘landing’ rituals in the vain hope that they could convince the great sky-god to return. Equipped with an identical combination of reverence for his source material and almost total failure in understanding how or why it actually works, Zack Snyder has made a cargo-cult 'Watchmen' as emotionally vacuous as it is visually spectacular.
What you won’t get is any of the stuff that made Watchmen the classic that even those suspicious of the graphic novel grudgingly regard it as today. It’s a version of the book as a fifteen year old boy might read it – obsessing over the kung-fu fighting, mad science and hot chicks in leather while skipping the clever, touching grace-notes and excursions into the everyday world of adult human relationships that gives the original its depth. Everything is filmed at the hysterical, melodramatic pitch so wearyingly common to the modern blockbuster, making it impossible to care about anything or anyone on the screen.
This is true even in the nastiest and most disturbing scenes, of which there are many - the film’s loving attitude to violence and gore being as adolescent as its creepy approach to sex and sexuality.
Remote islanders, after their first experience of seeing planes land with supplies, would often build replica ‘airfields’ – flattening out runways, lining them with torches, even enacting ‘landing’ rituals in the vain hope that they could convince the great sky-god to return. Equipped with an identical combination of reverence for his source material and almost total failure in understanding how or why it actually works, Zack Snyder has made a cargo-cult 'Watchmen' as emotionally vacuous as it is visually spectacular.