Watchmen (2009)
Directed by Zack Snyder
In a gritty and alternate 1985, the glory days of costumed vigilantes have been brought to a close by a government crackdown. But after one of the masked veterans is brutally murdered, an investigation into the killer is initiated. The reunited heroes set out to prevent their own destruction, but in doing so they uncover a sinister plot that puts all of humanity in grave danger.
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5 films that influenced Watchmen
What critics say influenced Watchmen
The swirling, mind-bending complexity of the plot -- made crystal clear by Snyder's exacting grasp of narrative as well as his refusal to stray from the structure of Moore's source material -- and the general atmosphere of moroseness and discontent, of doom and gloom, combine to foster an intense cinematic experience that makes Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight feel like an ant-free picnic on a sunny afternoon.
Despite a borderline kitschy tone and eruptions of violence, its intellectual ambition and loftier thematic concerns recall The Dark Knight and The Fountain , Darren Aronofsky's time-traveling, cosmic meditation on ultimate meaning.
While it traffics in some of the same philosophical and moral themes as last year's über-smash The Dark Knight , I believe Watchmen does so more successfully and with a much more interesting visual style.
The only true tragedy would be if this film and "The Dark Knight" -- like the original "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" in the '80s, conceived as grand statements and summings-up on the subject of the superhero -- led not to the medium moving on from caped crusaders but to a bunch of grim, gritty superhero ripoffs, which is what happened in comics.
Watchmen makes for kind of an interesting companion piece to last summer's The Dark Knight in that both are comic book movies that elevate the art form in part by daring to present challenging themes that go beyond the basic "hero versus villain."
I think this movie is so different than “The Dark Knight,” it’s difficult to compare the two.
Alan Moore, the book's masterly writer, divorced himself early on from the Hollywood project, mortified with what the studios did to his “V for Vendetta,” “From Hell” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”
“From Hell,” “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”), nothing has come so close to capturing the mad Englishman’s idiosyncratic style like this.
Moore, soured by the Hollywood mangling of From Hell , The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta , has removed his good name from the credits.
I read the book some time ago (it's not my favourite of Moore's books, but it is fantastic), and, having seen the film adaptations of "V for Vendetta" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", and having laughed my way through Snyder's "300", I wasn't expecting much.
One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.”
Snyder’s film is an extraordinarily mature, risky project for Hollywood to role the dice on, especially given similarly-complex explorations of social collapse and vigilantism (such as the 2005 adaptation of Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta ) have failed to do blockbuster numbers.
As with previous adaptations of his work (“From Hell,” “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ” and “V for Vendetta”), Moore, no friend to Hollywood, has distanced himself from this much-anticipated take on his notoriously unfilmable magnum opus.
Written by Alan Moore (who refused to be credited on the movie due to his dissatisfaction with adaptations of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta) and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, “Watchmen” was hailed as revolutionary in the comic book world.
We have Little Children’s Patrick Wilson as Night Owl—a rather wussy man with lots of expensive toys; Jackie Earle Haley as a redheaded sociopath named Rorschach (sounding like Christian Bale in Dark Knight); dead Denny from Grey’s Anatomy as the violent and not-so-funny Comedian; Malin Ackerman as some weird long-haired thing we couldn’t figure out (and who earned the funniest of slams in a particularly awesome Anthony Lane review in this week’s New Yorker ); and our would-be-boyfriend Matthew Goode, almost unrecognizable in blond hair and kind of doing a David Bowie circa Labyrinth kind of affect.
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Visually, Watchmen is a combination of those two movies plus Sin City and 300 (both based on graphic novels by Frank Miller).
Sure, just as "Sin City" would have been even better if Quentin Tarantino had directed all of it.
Writers David Hayter and Alex Tse and director Zack Snyder eschew the stylized look of other graphic-novel films (Sin City, 300) in favor of a sharply gleaming realism, and it’s a good call, giving the complex, delirious story a hard-edged sense of conviction.
After the opening, the film quickly rushes into 300 and Sin City territory: adapt a comic book by recreating it with panel-by-panel accuracy.
"Watchmen," like "Sin City" before it, relishes the specter of child molestation as a dramatic device, because once you've established a subhuman predator you can have someone like Rorschach in "Watchmen" ram an ax blade into a man's cranium in close-up, several times, over and over, and it's OK because he's vermin, and we've already seen two junkyard dogs fighting over the girl's severed leg.
Though the diminutive Haley is about the size of one of Mickey Rourke's steroidal biceps, he may offer the most compelling portrait of violent retribution since the latter's turn in Sin City.