We can get the review part over with pretty quickly: Watchmen is very big, not at all clever and pretty dire.
What it was was an excellent reminder of why we have so far preferred to blog about the glorious folly of the 1980s or the Swiss cheese cool of film noir.
Two films at the BFI Imax in as many months, but the contrast couldn’t have been more acute. I’d heard the mixed reviews of Watchmen, but I was banking on audiovisual muscle to make up the difference. An explosion or punch which fills up virtually your entire field of vision on a screen of roughly 540 square metres, and booms around your skull thanks to the 17,000 various speakers, would surely be such an assault on the senses that I wouldn’t notice it was a bit like all the other explosions or punches. I should have known better; I saw Beowulf here too, and that had been like watching someone else play a computer game. Blade Runner was a majestic experience for brain and eyes. Watchmen looked like what it was in this case: 540 square metres of crap.
I would like to see a few minutes of Watchmen re-cut. Nite Owl (had another masked superhero already taken Night Owl?) is really a man named Dan. He’s the slightly nerdy, gentle, goodhearted one. We hear that he suspects he disappointed his father by not following him into banking – he’s always been more into “birds and airplanes and mythology”. They’re nice hobbies, and he imparts the confidence with a winning, sheepish smile and duck of the head. Cut to an alley a bit later: Danny Nite Owl viciously cripples and murders goons that have attacked him. He could probably just have knocked them out, or got away, but he’s obviously more into Zack Snyder’s brand of mythology (the director is also responsible for 300). The violence is gleeful, utterly cartoonish, utterly gratuitous, like the film it mars.
Ahhhh and now, separated in the calendar but identical in location, I (comrade in watching and bloggering) too have slumped before the biggest screen in Britain and wondered at it’s content. Watchmen is in an awkward position having to follow Blade Runner as my last experience of the glorious IMAX, as has already been said. Intolerable choice of music jars throughout: it’s a who’s who of uber-tracks from the likes of Dylan and Hendrix. Quentin Tarantino’s greatest hatred is of films that try to steal the popularity, weight and resonance of music that already works in its own right and has nothing to do with the film. It’s like, he explains, watching a film and listening to the radio. Watch the sex scene set to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and decide which you’d rather turn off.
If I am to find a positive, it is the first twenty minutes. It looks great with slow-mo photo-shoots of past glory days but even then it is confused about what it is, they try to explain past and present characters in a confusing blur of miscellaneous super-herodom. Rarely is it suggested where anyone came from, what shaped their characters. The film is mechanical but with an eye looking over it saying ‘it looks a bit mechanical lets try and do something slightly weird here and there to give us more credibility’… self-consciousness again I fear, the cancer of film.
rain rain yawn
Watchmen delivers rain in spades. Every outdoor opportunity is rained on… ever since the first dystopian movies of the ’80s rain has been used in this way, making night shots glisten, sheeting across bent characters in the gloom, and somehow Watchmen is the first to manage to make even this small detail seem obvious and predictable. Again, see painful contrast with Blade Runner.
These complaints are all details though. Are any of the relationships here even slightly credible? Woman snuggles up to a giant blue glowing man who has no interest in human life, and then runs off to Dan because… she doesn’t know anyone else? It’s pointless and mundane and the most irrelevant, loveless, chemistryless, love story ever depicted on the big screen.
The ending: good in that it meant the film had finished, but bad in all other respects. The concept of humanity needing a God to keep it from falling into self-destructive ruin could, if carefully made, be at least fairly thought-provoking… but not here. By the end the film feels as tired as it’s audience, it’s lost its way, it’s lost and subtlety and style it started out with and has resorted to massive CGI explosions ‘epic’ visuals.
Out there in the film world there exists a well-trodden path to mediocrity, and Watchmen plants its shiny shiny boots along this path with unforgivable precision
