Watchmen

Director: Zack Snyder
Screenwriters: David Hayter, Alex Tse
Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup (interview), Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson (video interviews)
Running Time: 162 mins
Certificate: 18

With his third feature film, director Zack Snyder has zoned in on an area of superheroism that has been largely neglected by Hollywood: dysfunction. Watchmen's protagonists are the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan, striving to push forward the human race but completely disconnected from it; retired Nite Owl Dan Dreiberg (Wilson), who can only arouse himself when wearing superhero armour; extreme vigilante Rorschach (Haley), whose moral code is so strict it makes him a sociopath; and Laurie Jupiter (Akerman), who became a costumed hero to satisfy her mother.

Watchmen's scope and ambition is down to its origins as a landmark comic that explored ideas and storytelling techniques that hadn't been attempted before in the medium. The movie adaptation would have to be a kind of daring, Citizen Kane-like pioneer to come close to matching its impact. It doesn't. It is, though, about as successful as it could possibly hope to be by re-emerging in a form for which it wasn't designed. Drawing the conspiracy plot involving aging government-endorsed vigilante The Comedian (Morgan) to the foreground, Watchmen has forward drive and constant movement. It frequently leaps back through time to flesh out its characters. Doctor Manhattan's solemn exile on Mars recalling his youth and Rorschach's psychiatric interrogation provide sharp contrast between elegance and brutality.

Snyder injects cinematic flourish into the decades-spanning story - his opening montage, in which American history is reset to weave superheroes into the 20th century, brilliantly marries sound and image, with Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin' playing over sequences of the JFK assassination and Apollo moon landing. Later, Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' surfaces, cleverly re-purposed for the climactic ecstasy interpretation of Jeff Buckley. New York, where the bulk of the action takes place, feels like a close relation to the hellish streets Travis Bickle stalked in Taxi Driver, and there's even a Strangelove-style war room housing Richard Nixon (serving an unprecedented fifth term in this reality) and his Cold War paranoia.

Images from the graphic novel are awkwardly slid in to appease fans (a giant Manhattan stomping through Vietnam), and Nixon's presence does the film no favours in the wake of Frank Langella, yet in places there are improvements on the graphic novel. From the minor: Rorschach's killing of a diminutive gangster in a toilet is made both terrifying and funny simply by putting swinging hinges on a door. To the major: the revised ending, which emphasises the film's big thematic point - the use and abuse of power - gives Manhattan's journey a definite conclusion.

Within its labyrinthine narrative, Watchmen houses a harsh, morally ambiguous and unique take on cinema's superhero genre, while concurrently pointing out the absurdity of men and women pulling on costumes that magically turn them into gravity-defying crimebusters. Watchmen has taken two decades to get to cinemas. However, the biggest miracle is not that it's finally made it, but that it successfully spins a comic deemed to be unfilmable into a thoughtful, ante-upping blockbuster.


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