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Reviews of films

Watchmen

A lot has already been written about Watchmen – the big screen adaptation of the graphic novel many thought was unfilmable. Terry Gilliam is supposed to have asked creator Alan Moore how he would film Watchmen. "I wouldn’t" replied Moore (whose name is significantly absent from the movie’s credits as he has distanced himself from the project). It goes to great lengths to look like the comic – I’ve just flipped through the (unread) graphic novel and it looks exactly like the film – indeed the level of detail may be accurately described as slavish.

It’s about a group of retired or semi-retired super heroes who are trying to live normal lives while the cold war gets closer and closer to nuclear war. Then someone starts murdering super heroes and our motley band of once masked avengers start looking nervously over their shoulders. My first problem with the film is that the premise reminded me too much of the ITV2 sit com "No Heroics". Super heroes in every day lives – I wanted the guy from Nathan Barley and the gorgeous Claire Keelan to turn up and get rid of the pair of angst-ridden ex-vigilantes we were getting instead. But it wasn’t to be.

The film gave us flashbacks to the previous generation of heroes – the Minute Men. A band of happy, smiling do-gooders who cleaned up the streets and eventually passed their masked identities on to their less successful protégés. We never saw the Minute Men doing anything heroic and never really got the sense that they were anything other than a publicity stunt. Only when it came to Vietnam and the outlet it gave to the Comedian’s savagery did we get any sort of sense of why we were bothering to go back in time at all. I kept expecting that there would be something of significance in the flashbacks – that it was all part of a bigger story which would reach its conclusion in the present day (i.e. 1985 when the movie is set). But aside from one minor character point – which is entirely irrelevant in the bigger picture – the back-story doesn’t mean anything.

One of the criticisms of the film is that it keeps trying to make you think there is more depth there than there actually is. I understand where this point of view is coming from. Take the threat of impending nuclear war. This is building throughout the film – the doomsday clock is getting closer and closer to midnight, every talks about the upcoming armageddon and men in big rooms are making plans for a first strike but none of means anything. We don’t know WHY nuclear war is getting closer and closer. Being told something is happening isn’t the same as knowing (or caring) why it is happening. Are the Russians doing something? Is there a hideous breakdown in communications? They don’t say – they just keep giving us grim proclamations and expecting us to care. But – and this is the killer – no one in the film actually seems to care that the world is about to end. Our central characters just seem to lightly accept it. The world’s about to end and they are about as interested as they would be if gasoline went up 2 cents per gallon. 10 cents and they’d be angry but 2 cents and there is a shrug of the shoulders and a very slight sense of disapproval.

The film’s great strength is how it looks. It is big and epic looking with all the grime of a dystopian fantasy and all the gloss of a superhero blockbuster. The only weakness is the absurd nose they give Richard Nixon. It is massive. No one could he elected half a dozen times with a nose like that. American’s have some standards. Come to think of it, we’re never really told why Nixon is still president. There is a quick reference to repealing the two term limit but if they want us to think there is corruption in high places then they should do something to make us imagine there is corruption in high places. Instead he’s just there – old and ridiculous looking.

Another thing I wasn’t too keen on was that we see exactly one act of heroism from two (or is it three?) generations of heroes. Until the final battle – which I won’t say too much about because the final twist is probably the best bit of the film – they are really just people who put on costumes and… that’s it really. They eventually save some people from an extremely convenient burning building but that’s about all. Are they even meant to be super heroes or are they pretend super heroes? Is the point that the world once tolerated people who put on silly costumes and beat up muggers but is no longer willing to indulge these egomaniacs? It feels like a super hero movie – and looks like a super hero movie – but there are no super heroes in it.

Apart, of course, from Dr Manhattan. He’s a godlike being created when a nuclear experiment went wrong. He has just about every power you can imagine and single handedly ended the Vietnam War. He’s the reason the cold war is still cold as the Russians know he could destroy them at will. He presents an interesting problem of scale because he’s so powerful and everyone else in the film just looks like pieces of cheese in comparison. It’s hard to become involved in a story when you know that one of the central characters could sort everything out in a heartbeat. It’s something Doctor Who has always been careful to avoid – no matter how powerful and important they make the Doctor out to be, he’s always mortal enough for threats to remain real and problems to appear insoluble. To an extent the baddie does take steps to remove Dr Manhattan from the game – thus addressing the problem – but there is still this godlike being wandering through the film who could wrap it up and let us go home before our buttocks go completely numb.

I sound very negative about it – I don’t mean to be. I was nervous about going to see such a long film (two and three quarter hours) with my dodgy back and wandering attention span but it rattled along at a pace and it didn’t feel half as long as it was. There are lots of good bits – Rorschach in prison is an interesting study of a hero stripped of his identity and mask, locked in with the very people he put behind bars, and how he survives without anyone he can look to for help. But then it becomes just an excuse to have some gruesome violence and a prison break in which honest prison guards are dispatched as coldly and cruelly as the inmates who are rioting.

The film redeems itself a bit at the end. I thought it was just going to come down to another huge fist-fight between the main characters (sidebar – when did superheroes become people who had no super powers but were just great at martial arts?) but when the fight ended and the film didn’t, I was pleased to see they had something else up their sleeve.

All in all too much happens in Watchmen without it meaning anything. It could easily be trimmed down to a tighter hour and a half without losing anything important. All the asides and flashbacks don’t give depth to the characters we’re following – they simply give us more shallow characters. More people we don’t really know much about. That may be fine in a comic book where each issue moves the main plot along while allowing some time for pertinent tales from the previous generation but here it felt arbitrary and pointless. The excellent opening title sequence told us pretty much everything we needed to know about the Minute Men and the decline of the masked hero. Going back over and over again with nothing new to add (and not even entertaining us while they are there) just stops the film from moving on. At best it just makes the film’s main characters look less interesting and less successful than the former occupants of the costumes, at worst it stops the 1985 story from getting anywhere. It’s a series of things that happen for no particular reason to characters I couldn’t name if you paid me.

Watchmen is undoubtedly a contrast to traditional superhero stories. It goes to places they would never dream of going. But when you boil it down to what actually happens, a Batman clone yearns to put his suit back on while not actually showing any desire to do so, a woman has a fling with god but they can’t connect on any shared plane of existence, a creepy guy with a sock on his head beats up a lot of people and civilisation gets to the bring of collapse for no particular reason. That and two super heroes have a shag while still hot from saving a bunch of people from a fiery death. It’s well made and inoffensive. It just isn’t great when a lot of people hoped it would be. Maybe it really is unfilmable or maybe it just wasn’t that good to begin with. I’d have to read the book to find out which it is and this film left me with no desire to take the time to find out.

Postscript – I almost forgot the most memorable bit of the film. There were two cretins sat behind me and they kept talking during quiet bits of the film. They sounded like comic book bores but obviously weren’t as they waited the best part of a month before seeing the film. During the Wolverine trailer we had this –

Wolverine: I could cut your head off.

(fade to black)

Cretin: I’ve heard he does.

Then, during Watchmen, Dr Manhattan goes off to Mars for reasons I won’t bore you with. There is a tremendous flash as he teleports himself millions of miles across space and then… silence. "MARS!" bellows the cretin after a few seconds thought as to where this red planet might be. Well done for working it out.