Watchmen (2009) MA15+

When it was originally published in 1987, the graphic novel Watchmen, by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, was hailed as possessing a sense of psychological realism without precedent in the form, and lauded for its incisive portrayal of the effects of the Cold War on the American understanding of heroism. Among its many distinctions, it was the only comic book honoured with a place on TIME Magazine’s list of the All-Time 100 Best Novels. While it’s unlikely to achieve comparable honours, the film adaptation of Watchmen, the latest effort from director Zack Snyder (300), makes a deadly-earnest attempt on the meaty themes and self-reflexivity of its inspiration. If only the film could be judged by its good intentions.

When The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Grey’s Anatomy) is beaten to a pulp and thrown from his high-rise apartment window, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, Semi Pro) sets out to discover the assassin’s identity. Whether he does it out of self-concern or superhero solidarity is never really clear but, figuring they’ll share his alarm, he appeals for help to his erstwhile colleagues: a gang of misanthropic and dysfunctional vigilantes including the irradiated Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous), his long-suffering girlfriend, Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman, The Heartbreak Kid), the mild-mannered Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson, Angels in America) and the preening genius, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode, Match Point). They’re all too concerned with their various personal problems to commit to Rorschach’s whodunit (at least until very late in the game), but his arrival sparks a series of digressions and flashbacks through which we learn these characters’ troubled backgrounds, and watch them confront their uncertain future.

These trials of the superheart couldn’t come at a worse time. While President Nixon was, in the Watchmen universe, able to secure a third term by winning the Vietnam War, his luck in negotiating brinkmanship with the Russians has been less favourable. The so-called “doomsday clock”—whose function as a moderator of public sentiment seems roughly as efficacious as Fox News in the War on Terror—has just been set to “five minutes to midnight”, meaning nuclear trigger fingers on both side of the Pacific are getting extremely itchy.

As you can sense coming from about twenty minutes in, the paths to The Comedian’s murderer and the foiling of the impending holocaust will converge fortuitously in the end. The ethical double bind in which this lands our heroes is somewhat harder to see coming.

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While the likes of The Dark Knight and Sin City have done much to reinvigorate the comic book/superhero genre, both in terms of the canvas size and emotional terrain available, none has taken us as far into the heart of darkness as Watchmen. It renders the familiar push-pull of its heroes’ public responsibilities versus their guy/girl-next-door domestic tribulations with an unusually careful hand, and develops in its characters the kind of complex emotional problems and self-awareness at which Hancock’s attempts were so cringe-worthy. The Watchmen are concerned about their media profiles. They are variously sell-outs and stoics. They act heroically as much out of a need to feel alive and needed as any higher moral imperative, and they know it. They are confounded by their Sisyphean duties in a world perpetually at war. They are beholden to the good opinion of a reliably unappreciative citizenry, whom they never truly meet. They are faced with evils they elect not to act upon, and they are forced to wonder why.

Which sounds great. But where the Batman films work and Watchmen, despite the great earnestness with which it pursues this stuff, does not is in the pleasure of watching. In Batman, we are willing to brave the darkness because, somewhere, there'll be light. Perhaps because of the intensity of its thematic ambitions, Watchmen ends up taking itself far too seriously. In its relentless examination of superheroic ennui, it often loses sight of the fact that brooding is not the same thing as being thoughtful; that nostalgia is not the same thing as reflection. The result is that what is intended as sprawling and epic becomes meandering and ponderous; what is designed to be complex ends up opaque; and the handful of riffs intended to be fun are, by the time we get to them, simply too few. Darkened throughout by the shadow of Armageddon, the dank, crumbling world of Watchmen becomes too joyless to like and reveals its characters as too damaged to redeem it.

Given which, it’s ironic that where the film further lets itself down is in its seeming disinclination to treat its context as seriously as its characters. Latent in the third act are perhaps the timeliest questions Watchmen might have asked: Does the need for heroes disappear when politicians assume their mantle? Does individual heroism become obsolete when most people’s problems are inherently political, their solutions likely macroeconomic? And, perhaps most importantly, should we presume that God, if he exists (which he does here, in the form of Dr Manhattan), cares enough about the world to prevent its destruction, let alone take sides? It was on this ground that Watchmen might have staked its claim to greatness, or at least justified its wearyingly anhedonic tone. Sadly, it’s ground the filmmakers seem bashful to tread. Instead they content themselves with glib broadsides (television referred to a “super weapon”—zang!) and music hall prosthetic gags (Nixon’s nose has grown in step with his tenure—kapow!). In this sense, the ending is also hackle-raising: test-audience-approved denouement meets undergrad Nietzsche. This structural bow-ribbon doesn’t just feel at odds with the rest of the film, it does nothing whatsoever to address the character dilemmas with which the bulk of the story is concerned. The net result is a similar brand of pyrrhic moral victory as ended 300. However much the swelling soundtrack endeavours to make it seem otherwise, the characters are in fact left with far bigger problems than they had going in.

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Will fans of Snyder’s trademark balletic violence and slow-motion gore have fun? Some. Whether or not the belabouring of this aesthetic makes him—as has been so incessantly billed—a visionary is another question. The claim seems a little grandiose given his short list of credits, the two best-known of which have been adaptations of successful graphic novels, much of the “visionary" legwork having already been done by someone else.