ZEE'S REVIEWS

24th April 2009
Watchmen (2009)

A world in the grip of a cold war, constantly on the brink of nuclear annihilation. A world where superheroes are real, and banned, and often highly dysfunctional people. A world where someone has begun murdering them one by one.

This is the world of Watchmen.

Ever since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's comic was released to great acclaim, over twenty years ago, it has been called unfilmable. But is director Zack Snyder's adaptation a successful answer to that challenge?

The problem is this is a trick question. In some ways, Watchmen will never be filmable, because what makes it a classic is the way it pushes the boundaries of sequential art storytelling: structures, layouts, patterns, motifs. The medium is the message. You could film a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, but whether that would convey the essence of James Joyce's Ulysses is unlikely.

However, in terms of the story, the movie largely works. It manages to convey the complex plot, accurately portray the characters, and capture the essence of its nihilistic, disillusioning, morally adrift world. The use of period music is effective, especially Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", which plays while the opening montage orients us to the history of this alternate universe. This is not a movie for the faint of heart, with its extreme and frequent violence, and protagonists who are not so much flawed as broken. There are no heroes here, only those who believe they are or used to believe it. Who watches the Watchmen?

The movie is reasonably faithful to the original storyline, except for one major change near the end. In the comic, this climactic revelation was a punch in the gut, a moment of shock and horror that was hard to forget. In the movie, this is turned into a much more conventional plot development, which fails to have the same impact. I was expecting that scene to blow me away, and it fizzled out. Highly disappointing.

The Watchmen movie is, in the end, a mixed success: not a flawless adaptation by any means, but perhaps the closest we can come in this flawed world.