Watchmen (****)

Directed by: Zack Snyder
Starring: Billy Crudup, Malin Ackerman, Jackie Earle Haley, Matthew Goode, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino
Seen: March 7th and March 14th and April 4th 2009

**** Out of ****

Upon seeing Watchmen for the first time, I did not yet read the “graphic novel”, but I was desperately searching for it in every bookshop I walked by. I had started reading about the lore of Watchmen only a short while before the film started, and was already extremely interested in what Zack Snyder, who brought us the extremely stylized, but not as good 300, would do with material such as this.

The film starts in 1985 in the 20th floor apartment of Edward Blake, or the Comedian (Morgan), who gets murdered (thrown out the window) after a spectacular fight with an intruder, cutting to slow motion that lingers on shots I can only imagine comes straight from the graphic novel. From the opening sequence, featuring Bob Dylan’s “The Times They are a-Changin’”, I was blown away by the visual power on display on screen in almost every frame. The opening credits themselves tell a massive amount of back story using 3D photographed to moving scenes of old: heroes standing around for photographs, smiling and happy among friends, heroes fighting crime and crime scenes where the heroes themselves became the victims, the story of how heroes help the US win the Vietnam war and these same heroes being involved in JFK’s assassination, as well as the outlawing of heroes, and the decline of the heroes’ golden age.

As no one knows who killed Blake, Rorschach (Haley), mounts his own investigation into things, and starts involving (or at least tries to) all the old Watchmen: Daniel Dreiberg, or Nite Owl II (Wilson), Laurie Juspeczyk or Silk Spectre II (Ackerman), Jon Osterman or Dr. Manhattan (Crudup) and Adrian Veidt or Ozymandiaz (Goode). His pleas fall on mostly deaf ears though, and the now-outlawed heroes continue their unheroic lives. Until things start getting too close to home that is. I can’t go into more detail without telling too much, and that will take some time, since I’ve rarely seen so many different storylines so deftly handled in 2 hours and 45 minutes. The story is complex to an almost spectacular degree, and through it all Snyder manages to keep the viewer up to speed with what is going on, where everything fits, and how it fits too.

Haley’s performance as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach is brilliant. The character is fantastic, his always changing-inkblot-mask a constant source for fascination along with his stubborn vigilantism, which eventually lands him in jail, exposed to everyone he put there, which gives rise to one of the more brutal elements of the film. Morgan, in Blake, gives us a character easily loathed, but still the viewer sympathises with him (even if in a small degree). Wilson’s Dan Dreiberg is completely aloof from normal humanity, a geek of sorts afraid to do anything, but when he turns back into Nite Owl II he becomes an extremely powerful figure. Ackerman and Crudup gives a strange detached quality to the collapsing relationship between Laurie/Silk Spectre II and Jon/Dr. Manhattan, who is not human anymore, but more of a god-like figure, and the USA’s only hope of staving off nuclear war with the USSR, and Goode’s Adrian Veidt/Ozymandiaz is the smartest man on earth, and is almost the most powerful of the watchmen, apart from Dr. Manhattan, thanks to his superhuman speed (not shown as a blur, but rather just as normal, with everything around him standing still).

This is not your typical Superman or Spiderman comic-book film, choosing rather to keep itself busy with far darker and tougher subject matter. The film is crammed with one spectacular scene after another, and handles such difficult subjects as possible nuclear holocaust, rape, murder, sex and extreme violence, all portrayed to a very real extent, and this might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But those of us who know that life offers light and dark, and appreciate it for what it is and can be, will also enjoy Watchmen, I know I did.