“It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

-The Monarch, paraphrasing MacBeth

This quote is from an episode of The Venture Brothers [1].  In it, Monarch is describing a failed effort to void his bowels.  This quote resonated the entire time I watched Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film.  The more I considered it, the more I came to realize its relevance.  With Watchmen, Snyder has digested the source material, absorbed every possible bit of nutrition, and left a steaming pile for his audience to step in [2].

I read comic books.  I have those obvious biases.  But I can, believe it or not, divorce myself from my fierce devotion to the great work of Alan Moore.  Hence, I shall articulate my hatreds of this movie in two streams of consciousness: strictly as a motion picture, and as relating to the book from which it allegedly sprang [3].

Superhero movies are - like the comic book genre that inspire them – quite insular.  They operate on a long defined set of conventions, a common vernacular, their own spectacular iconography.  In translating these four-color wonders to the silver screen, a lot of the magic is lost.  It becomes familiar (i.e. palatable).  The movies must continuously vie to outdo their predecessors, heaping action upon action, stunt upon stunt, assailing the imagination, rendering it comatose.  This betrays a central idiom of any form of art/entertainment: audience participation [4].  Movies must be accessible to the lowest common denominator.  Therefore they are often polished to a crass sheen.  For some stories, this is a serviceable treatment.  In some characters there is no depth.

The characters in Watchmen have no depth.  The Comedian and Rorschach are simplistic, antagonistic right wing caricatures [5].  Ozymandias is the dandy liberal villain, blatantly arrogant, plainly evil [6].  Silk Spectre is the token female lead to a T, never finding consistency nor variance in her personality, resulting in a presence akin to a mannequin [7].  Only Doctor Manhattan, in his superhuman alienation and Nite Owl, caged by a denial of his own design, only these two roles even begin to hint at something memorable or worthwhile under all the cacophony [8].

Without convincing, compelling characters to drive the proceedings, that thrust is left to the plot, of which there is little.  What could be a marvelous take on the murder mystery is obliterated before the opening credits have even rolled, as the Comedian’s murder is recounted through a brutal, egregious fight scene.  From the outset it is plain that whoever did the deed is at the very least the physical equal of Edward Blake [9].  Following this blunder the aforementioned credits present a compressed, alternate history of the US, using touchstones from the lives of first generation heroes the Minutemen to lend the film’s present day points of reference.  These are scarcely followed up in the film, leaving the entire exercise largely a waste of time [10].  In a movie that’s nearly three hours long, a director should have better things to do than hide Easter eggs.

And that’s the central failure in Watchmen: its gross, overdone nature.  While there are moments taken verbatim from the graphic novel, they stand in stark contrast to the filmmakers’ additions and revisions [11].  This creates a sizeable gap that is never bridged.  It also buffs the peaks and valleys necessary to an effective drama down to an even plain.  At its core Watchmen is a drama, not an action blockbuster, and being approached as the latter undoes the movie’s grand potential.

The gratuitous nature of the sex and violence only exacerbate the hackneyed story [12].  Coupled with stilted acting, the picture is dropped in league with so many other also-rans.  The Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Spectre I, for example, is so overwrought that the characters’ later relationship is unfathomable.  Similarly, the catharsis of Walter Kovacs’ psychological transformation into Rorschach is eclipsed by the grisly murder that inspires it.  So many profundities are lost in the application of the Hollywood formula.  This attempt to relate to the general moviegoer will be likely met with ambivalence, simultaneously irritating the book’s ardent fans.  Zack Snyder has pleased no one but himself, and his studio masters [13].

Were the film played as a straight action flick full of bluster and bravado, it may have been easier to watch.  But given the proclamations of the ubiquitous press junket, “Based on the Most Critically Acclaimed Graphic Novel of All Time”, “From the Visionary Director of 300”, etc., clearly we are meant to expect more than a Mel Gibson-meets-Wachowski Brothers grotesquerie of this caliber.  Fortunately  I did not, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be as bad as it actually is.