Toronto – Since this film isn’t exactly an unknown phenomenon, I’ll save some of you the time: Yes it is good, yes you should watch it in the theater unless your TV is the size of Dr. Manhattan’s manhood, and yes you should read the book.
It’s the cold war era. With an imminent threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction, humanity is at a lost. People started to take justice into their own hands – hooded vigilantism, to be exact. We break out to the blues of good’ol times, villains and heroes rise and fall, until some previously enigmatic physicist got nuked by an intrinsic field remover beam thingy. “Superman exists, and he IS American”. John, or Dr. Manhattan, who can control the intimate details of the universe immediate to his presence, changed history and the balance of cold war. In the face of John’s omnipotence, Russians began to stockpile their nukes insanely, hoping to counter in quantity; Viet-cons surrendered to the US; ordinary life seem more stable than ever before. Out of this social boredom came the backlash against masked heroes and their somewhat erratic/sociopathic behavior – causing most of them to retire or go into hiding. And THEN as we slide into the alternate 1980s, the actual story begins… one of them was murdered. Someone is eliminating masks systematically. Since we’re not exactly talking about people who bend over easily, this is obviously worth investigating. In comes Rorschach, a masked hero who never retired, defiant in the face of Armageddon. Through this investigation, he saw the revival of the mask heroes, betrayal of his friends, destruction and reformation of Dr. Manhattan’s humanity, and lots of action, before he discovers the bottom of hell.
I don’t think even the Dark Knight or Ironman can topple the visuals in this movie – only the Golden Army comes close. The style was a little iconoclastic – slow motion in moments of pain and suffering, and splinters of happiness brief. Dave Gibbons drew the original graphic novel so well, that the movie followed the flow of the comic nearly frame by slow-pacing frame until all of the characters were established. With the sole exception of the opening sequence where the backdrop of nuclear war and masked vigilantism is flushed out in gruesome slow motion, it did not omit much and the economy of not including the parallel pirate story (the comic within a comic) certainly helped (this was a 3 hr movie already!) There was no lack of gore, genitals, sex, violence and general hatred towards mankind, which is a solid decision – sanitization of the novel into a Marvel superhero graphics galore would have been a slap in the face for fans. One thing they did change was the ending. Instead of blaming things on aliens like the original did, Dr. Manhattan became the scapegoat. I loved the soundtrack, though. Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, even Philips Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi found its way into the film at the opportune time. Nice.
You can probably guess my rating on this film. It would have been interesting to experiment with an alternate Watchmen. But for sticking to the tried-and-true and doing a bloody and occasionally cheesily good job of it, 4.5/5. If they had retained John’s “nothing EVER ends” punchline and not compromised to produce a kissing opportunity, this would have been golden.
