Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Review: Watchmen

Bottom line: Mildly entertaining digital puppet show but the few good ideas are undone by good intentions and the revised ending misses the point.

[spoilers follow, as if you care] The "best comic book movie ever made" is now officially a bomb, and with good reason. The director and writers waste their opportunity with a shallow, empty recreation of the graphic novel. There are moments when the movie feels like it's really working and then you realize that it's only because they're riffing off another source. The whole film lacks a feel for the 80s flavour that's captured so perfectly by Napoleon Dynamite.

For example, a large chunk of the first third of the movie borrows heavily from Blade Runner and at first it seems like a lot of fun, especially since both stories are from the postmodern 80s noir genre, so they share a lot of similarities. But it's more recreation than interpretation and ends up feeling like a Blade Runner ride at Epcot Centre (that's right -- Epcot -- not even a fun amusement park). At first it sounds like Vangelis, then you realize that it's Vangelis-styled elevator music. We've been there, it was called the first Blade Runner soundtrack. When they finally leave the Blade Runner stuff behind, it changes the entire tone of the flick ... that is what it would have felt like if they'd changed illustrators halfway through the book.

Nods to other flicks are squashed in, but they're cheap and shallow. In a scene set in Vietnam, they make reference to the 'Ride of the Valkyries' bit from Apocalypse Now with a cheap computer graphic (the song is mentioned in the novel in a different context). In another nod to Kubrick, they lovingly recreate the 'War Room' from Dr. Strangeove but replicate none of the hijinks that brings the absurdity of the original to life. Every film reference makes you long for the original source where it was done better and without CGI.

Some subtle changes are troubling. In the novel, the character of Ozymandias is a square-jawed "superman". In the movie, he's nerdy, intellectual and effeminate, recalling the interview where Watchmen writer Alan Moore called Snyder's 300 "homophobic". Even if you argue that the movie version of the character was inspired by Bill Gates -- who isn't gay, btw -- that changes the spirit of the story.

But then, the spirit of the story is completely tossed by the ending. A lot of fanboys have argued that the new ending is an 'improvement' over the orginal. It replaces a giant, genetically-modified psychic squid with ... wait for it ... FIVE HUNDRED 9/11s!!! ... Maybe it was less. It's a notion so stupid, it was already parodied in Team America: World Police. If your "improved ending" was parodied five years ago, good work.

Because the revised ending is lame, it knocks the forward momentum out of the detective story that's supposed to act as the movie's narrative spine and the story flops around and wanders in a lot of spots. It's made more obvious every time the tough kid from The Bad News Bears shows up. He's the most engaging character in the movie and carries much of it and when he's offscreen, the movie sags like a couple of the other character's penises.

The ending is also whitewashed; you don't see much of the destruction and there's no blood or bodies or madness as in the novel and none of the horror. ... er, the horror. It doesn't appear that the filmmakers appreciated -- or agreed with -- the point of the ending, which was something about terror being the product of utopian projects. Wasn't that the great unlearned lesson of the whole 20th Century?

And that's a funny thing as we've just spent the better part of the past decade unlearning the great unlearned point oft he 20th Century yet again.. 9/11 supposedly put an end to irony and heroes & heroic projects became real again during the Bush years ... and now the world finds itself dealing with squid. Too soon?

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