"Watchmen," round 3.

By David Hudson on 03/05/2009

[Updated through 3/7]

"'Watchmen' is widely considered unfilmable, and [Zack] Snyder's adaptation fails on almost every level," writes Jürgen Fauth. "Yes, Snyder, who gave '300' such vivid life, recreates the comic's most iconic visual elements: the blood-stained smiley face, Rohrschach's morphing mug, the Owl Ship bursting out of the East River, Dr Manhattan's glowing blue schlong. Most memorable lines of dialogue are spoken verbatim. But aside from the superficial signifiers, the movie gets most everything else disastrously wrong. In fact, I daresay it's the worst adaptation of an Alan Moore comic yet."

"Stuffed to the gills with as much as 163 minutes will allow," writes Nick Schager in Slant, "'Watchmen' comes off as feeling at once too long and, thanks to the nagging impression that we're racing through abridged material that's been shoehorned in lest the rabid fanboy base cry foul, not quite long enough to provide the formal and thematic inventiveness or contemplative soul of its source material. A reverential photocopy of a superior original, it's often close to perfect, if also, to some extent, perfectly pointless."

"Apart from amping up the violence and gore - not much of a surprise from the director of '300' - Snyder hews close to his source," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But in staying true to the letter of Moore and [Dave] Gibbons' 'Watchmen,' he is false to its spirit. Where the comic was experimental, Snyder is slavish; where it led, he follows."

"Alan Moore was right," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "There isn't a movie in his landmark graphic novel 'Watchmen' - at least not a really good one."

"Hit or flop, Watchmen is nothing less than a test of pop culture's maturity and juvenilia," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

In PopMatters, Bill Gibron stages a "Psycho Smackdown: 'Watchmen's' Rorschach vs 'The Dark Knight's' Joker."

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Updates: "[I]f a work of art can be judged by its influence, then 'Watchmen' failed completely," argues Grady Hendrix in Slate. And yes, he's talking about the sacred text itself: "'Watchmen's' failure wasn't that it failed to influence other comics but that the book's most meaningless and shallow aspects were mistakenly hailed as its virtues and then widely imitated. Much praised for its 'realistic' take on superheroes, 'Watchmen' made the point that superheroes, realistic or otherwise, were beside the point. Its costumed do-gooders are retired, impotent, or insane, and they generally do more harm than good." And he's just getting started.

"Unlike his evil 'Watchmen' protagonist Ozymandias, Moore does not feel the spirits of history move him to fight injustice or destroy the world," writes Andrew Firestone, introducing his interview. "Rather, he seeks to do what he has always done: to push the boundaries of fiction by making murky waters clearer, and imparting his understanding to his readers. Salon spoke to Moore by phone while he was working on the third volume of 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (which will be published this April) about his career, his favorite psychotic characters and 'Watchmen's' bad influence on the comics world."

"Instead of subverting comic-book superhero tropes and satirizing Cold War endgames, it blandly and reflexively endorses them," argues Jonathan Kiefer. "No wonder Moore wanted his name off of this thing; it registers his most interesting preoccupations - the vainness of heroism, the absoluteness of power corrupting, the historically possible doomsday - only glibly, with indulgently cartoonish brutality."

"Snyder spends much of the movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet 'Watchmen' has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies."

"Zack Snyder's last film, the vile '300,' should be locked in a cargo container and buried at a toxic dump site," writes Dana Stevens. "Perhaps because of its brainier source material, 'Watchmen' is nowhere near as violent, but the action scenes unfold with a similarly sadistic delectation. Whenever a fight begins (and there's one about every 15 minutes in this 160-minute movie), brace yourself for an abundance of narratively pointless bone-crunching, finger-twisting, limb-sawing, and skull-hacking. These extreme sports are often filmed in 'Matrix'-style slow motion, a technique that tends to grind the story to a halt. Like the money shots in porn movies, Snyder's action scenes are an end in themselves - gratifying if you like that sort of thing, gross if you don't."

Also in Slate, Dan Kois and Ashley Quigg: "Imagine if 'Watchmen' had been directed by Judd Apatow, or Sofia Coppola, or Woody Allen. Actually, you don't have to imagine those dire scenarios: We've imagined them for you." Plus: Tom Shone's 2005 review of the 20th anniversary edition of the original.

"[I]n the end, the film's ambitious drive to create a dread-soaked alternate America and people it with flawed, recognizable heroes carries it along," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club (where you can also listen to a roundtable discussion). "Snyder uses grand gestures to create a sense of world-imperiling doom rooted in another era, but equally at home in this one. But he also remains willing to slow down to capture the gravity of a funeral, or dwell on a moment between old partners patching up a friendship as doomsday approaches. Moore's touch emphasizes how messed-up and needy comic-book people would have to be to do what they do. Missteps and all, Snyder's film gets that right, and this as well: When we look up in the sky, we don't see a bird or a plane, but a mirror."

"After the revelation of 'The Dark Knight,' here is 'Watchmen,' another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie," writes Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times. "It's a compelling visceral film - sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it's not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope."

"[W]hat the film rightfully retains, and often nails, is the book's commitment to seriously digging deep into the psychic debris of these archetypes; not even last year's 'The Dark Knight' ventured this far into the abyss, which helps make the film's myriad flaws far more forgivable," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

Kyle C's review is, appropriately, a comic.

The Chicago Reader posts Noah Berlatsky's capsule review - he finds it "oddly hollow and disjointed" - and notes that the Tribune's Michael Phillips grants "Watchmen" one and a half stars.

Kevin Buist at the SpoutBlog: "It's clear that Snyder has found a kindred spirit in Dr Manhattan. As Silk Spectre II distances herself from her big, blue, supernatural lover, she says a line that could just as easily be meant for the director himself, 'You know how everything fits together, except people.'"

"[F]inally, 'Watchmen' the movie makes a really good ad for and introduction to 'Watchmen' the book," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy.

"So, you may find yourself wondering what the hell is happening during 'Watchmen,' but that's built into the very nature of the experience - and it should elicit an appreciative smiley-smile rather than a frustrated frown." Jim Emerson: "You don't feel (as I sometimes did in 'TDK') that you're in the hands of a movie that just isn't very competently made. There's no question this picture knows exactly what it's doing and that it respects your ability to put the parts together. You do not have to wonder what the hell is going on between shots (why is that over there now?) because the movie's seams are showing."

The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu: "'What has happened to us? What has happened to the American dream?' a character asks. The answer might be: 'You, Zack Snyder. Man-boy directors, blessed with skill but no soul, content to peddle enervatingly reverential treatments of soft porn for kidults.'"

"All in all, the film is pretty compelling myth-making, albeit for those who are willing to invest in its highly specialized world," writes Kurt Halfyard at Twitch. "It is smarter and ambitious than than swath of lazy comic book films popping into the multiplex every year (Ang Lee's 'Hulk' and Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight' excepted) even if it is not quite up to snuff as a pure popcorn muncher or really have any semblance of humanity on display."

"Snyder's faithful yet inert film version of 'Watchmen' seems destined to be a landmark achievement in the realm of superhero nudity, but anything more than that seems unlikely," writes Paul Matwychuk.

Screengrab presents reviews from Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark and lists "The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time."

Online listening tip. At GreenCine Daily, Aaron Hillis, Andrew Grant and Glenn Kenny: "One of us decries 'avant-garde masterpiece,' one of us liked it so-so, and one of us thought it was tedious, but you'll just have to hear for yourself."

Updates, 3/6: "I'm shocked to be writing this," admits Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, "given the number of screenwriters, directors and studios this adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' ground-breaking 1986 anti-superhero comic series has gone through, but 'Watchmen' is absolutely devastating. Dense, intense, tragic and visionary, this is the kind of movie that keeps setting off bombs in your brain hours after you've seen it. After coming out of the theater, I wandered the frozen streets of Manhattan watching passersby and wondering which was the real city, the apparently peaceful one I inhabit now or the one that faces Armageddon at the mid-80s height of the Cold War in the Moore-Gibbons universe. If I could have gone back inside and watched the movie all over again, I'd have done it."

"Dr Manhattan's existence is busy and fairly melancholy, but I do envy him his ability to perceive every moment of past and future time as a part of a continuous present," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "If I had that power, the 2 hours 40 minutes of Zack Snyder's grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology might not have felt quite so interminable. ('It will never end,' says Dr Manhattan. 'Nothing ever ends.' No indeed.) Also, an enhanced temporal perspective would make it possible to watch 'Watchmen' not in 2009 but back in 1985, when the story takes place, and when the movie might have made at least a little more sense."

"There's a lot of ambition," grants Paul Constant in the Stranger: "Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, Annie Leibovitz and Lee Iacocca were never characters in a Batman movie. The World Trade Center looms, self-importantly, in the back of quite a few shots. The 163-minute running time passes quickly, and the special effects are beautiful. But without spoiling anything, the ending of the movie, which completely differs from the comic, seems superficially smarter at first, but falls apart under the stress of a few seconds' consideration."

"There is something exhilarating in the sheer madness of 'Watchmen,'" writes Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. "[I]t is dizzy, crazy and quite sexy - when it's not being self-indulgent and pointless. If it doesn't quite hang together or add up, or stick faithfully to the comic-book original, these offences aren't major. What a spectacle."

"This movie may be as good a feature-length version of the graphic novel as you could hope for, but it lacks urgency and passion, at least dramatically," writes Sean Axmaker. "It's a dazzling pageant of Alan Moore's 'Watchmen,' but there were only brief moments where I felt that I was seeing Zach Snyder's 'Watchmen.'"

For PopMatters' Bill Gibron, "Zack Snyder has stepped up to attempt the unimaginable - and has sort-of succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams."

"[T]ry as he might, Snyder can't sabotage the sheer majesty of the source material," writes Tom Huddleston in Time Out London.

Online paging tip. Production designer Alex McDowell talks Eric Kohn through a slide show at the SpoutBlog.

"The absurdities and uglinesses of Moore's original work are also more evident because Snyder's film is incapable of the narrative gymnastics of the comic," writes Christopher Orr in the New Republic. "As a result, 'Watchmen,' which ought to highlight the strengths of its source material, too often reveals the weaknesses instead."

"'Watchmen' is a bore," sighs Phillip Kennicott in the Washington Post. "Sad to say, after a wait of more than two decades, the much-anticipated adaptation of the world's most celebrated graphic novel is long, dull and subject to what might be called the 'Lord of the Rings' problem: It sinks under the weight of its reverence for the original."

"Beware the follow-up to a blockbuster," warns Anne Thompson at the Daily Beast:

Directors never have more freedom to take ambitious risks than after a blockbuster. And studios, it seems, just can't say no. They indulge directors such as Michael Cimino - after the Oscar-winning "Deer Hunter," his big-budget western "Heaven's Gate" literally brought down United Artists. After the blockbuster "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Universal gave Peter Jackson $20 million against 20 percent of the gross to co-write, direct, co-produce, and deliver effects for "King Kong"; the three-hour epic cost $202 million, and the studio barely came out ahead. And after the "Matrix" movies, the Wachowskis, who directed, stumbled with their own Alan Moore project, producing the disappointing "V for Vendetta" - and then wrote and directed the disastrous "Speed Racer."

Warners jumped into the Moore universe again with "Watchmen" because two years ago, Snyder's $60 million blue-screen action epic "300," based on Frank Miller's graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae, opened to $70 million and grossed an astonishing $456 million worldwide.... ["Watchmen"] is expected to open big this weekend, perhaps between $60 and $70 million. The question that makes Warner Bros nervous: Will it continue to play?

"You say most big Hollywood movies are all action, no character buildup?" asks Robert Horton in the Herald. "Check out 'Watchmen,' which - despite frequent bursts of extreme ultraviolence - is almost all character buildup, and very little real action."

"It is the comic book movie equivalent of Gus Van Sant's 'Psycho': a technically accurate but dramatically inert copy of its source." Matt Singer at the Rumpus: "As an exercise, as an experiment, as fodder for a conversation about the positives and negatives of fidelity in adaptation, it's an achievement. As a movie, it's at best an exhausting but visually stunning mess and, at worst, a piece of cinematic karaoke."

"Unlike the typical superhero movie, 'Watchmen' is a film of big ideas, and one of them is that mass carnage can usher in an era of peace," writes Robert Davis for Paste. "Snyder never seems to consider the problems of macho justice. My advice to the entire naive lot - to the blue god, Rorschach, the geeky-sexy couple, the effeminate liberal (there's always an effeminate liberal) and Snyder himself - is this: Do not overestimate the longevity of global unity or the productiveness of violence, on any scale."

Updates, 3/7: "Outside of [Jackie Earle] Haley's turn as Rorschach - masked or unmasked, a remarkably vivid and strangely winning personification of the intersection of monosyllabic knee-jerk conservatism, self-delusion and sociopathy - the cast generally flounders on a raft of exposition-heavy words bobbing in an uncaring sea of ambitious visuals." Bruce Bennett for Stop Smiling: "More's the pity as the underlying messy three-dimensional humanity of a group of people who uphold unambiguous notions of justice was one of the central kicks of the Watchmen book and of the various and sundry revisionism-tinged comics that have stocked newsstands since Stan Lee's early 60s heyday."

"The production design is fantastic," writes Andrew Hultkrans for Artforum:" Its obsessive recreation of the color palette, costumes, and set-pieces of the graphic novel should satisfy the most hardened Gibbons devotee. The direction, by contrast, suffers from an overly static camera (to evoke still comic panels) and an occasional mishandling of the deep melancholy and creeping nihilism of these 'heroic' characters. Nobody who saw '300' would mistake Snyder for a nuanced Bergmanesque dramatist, but his not-quite-mature understanding of the human condition (super- or otherwise) does Moore's characterization a disservice."

Via MCN, more on the "blue schlong" from Phoebe Connelly (American Prospect) and at Vulture: "Dr Manhattan's 'Giant Blue Wiener' Gets 'Glowing' Reviews."

Matt Dentler explains why he's not watching "Watchmen."

Online viewing tip. The cinetrix has the Boston Globe's Ty Burr and Wesley Morris giving an amusing video review. "It's called 'Watchmen' because you just keep checking your watch."

[Photo: "Watchmen," Warner Bros, 2009]

Tags: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, Zack Snyder