It’s almost become trendy to shit on everything Zack Snyder’s ever done from a great height lately. The knockback from the middling Batman v Superman has somehow tarnished his earlier works in the minds of many, as if they’re now lesser movies by simple association.
He is, and I say this with a heavy heart as someone who has all the time in the world for his first three movies, the Nickelback of filmmakers.
Snyder’s distinctive style (which has, admittedly, always been favoured over anything of substance) -whether it be his affinity for shoehorning in popular music where it doesn’t belong or his steadfast reliance on slow-motion fight scenes- has earned him plenty of critics. Depending on who you talk to, it might be his fault entirely that the DCEU was a bit of a shitshow before Wonder Woman came around and set things back on track.
How the Michael Bay of superhero movies became the most polarising director today is a thousand word article for someone else to write. Instead, it’s time to ask why Snyder’s 2009 Watchmen movie now seems to be a bad movie by proxy.
The above comes from iO9, which shouldn’t surprise anybody who’s ever been on a Gizmodo Media Group site before – they gave up on anything but miserablism a long time ago.
The comments for the Facebook post are hearteningly positive, summing up the divide in attitudes between critics and the average moviegoer as a whole; Watchmen belongs to an elite club of movies that no two people seem to be able to agree on. Its harshest detractors use Snyder’s influence as a lightning rod for criticism while its defenders appreciate it for what it is.
Just about the most faithful comic book adaptation ever put to screen.
Whenever an IP makes its way to the big screen, huge concessions and deviations are almost to be expected in order for it to “appeal to the masses”, often leading to mixed results in terms of fan reception. We’ve seen it on an almost bi-annual basis with the MCU, and perhaps most strikingly when World War Z finally appeared in cinemas after years in development hell – I don’t remember seeing any mention of Pepsi worshipping in Max Brooks’ book.
But you couldn’t say the same for Snyder’s Watchmen. It’s not a pitch perfect adaptation, often embellishing some fight scenes and ramping up the melodrama, but for once it felt like an adaptation that needed some creative changes.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ limited DC series is many things, but it certainly doesn’t offer much vibrancy, which feels kind of like the point. It’s an exercise in nihilism, a flat and often miserable sojourn into an alternate world where the superheroes aren’t all that super and the red tape is almost suffocating. If Snyder had taken the absolutely literal approach to adaptation, audiences would have left theaters as emotionless as Doctor Manhattan – probably with equally as blue balls, too.
Even with some changes and notable exclusions (calamari, anyone?), Watchmen was going to be a hard sell. If anything, it came out too soon, hitting theaters when Marvel were only just digging their roots into multiplexes for the next ten years and beyond.
Just shy of hitting the three hour mark, Watchmen is a dense as all hell movie. It hits some notes and fluffs others, but by the end of it, there’s a real connection to these “heroes”. The motley crew of misfits have never been on cereal boxes or serialised in mid-morning television shows, and Snyder revels in the deglamorisation of their lives. The Comedian is an out-and-out piece of shit, Silk Spectre cannot live up to the reputation of her mother, Nite Owl is hilariously uncool, and Rorschach smells like a fiery diaper.
Thanks to Snyder’s sometimes charmingly lightweight approach to storytelling, Watchmen breezes along without bringing the audience down with the unending cynicism found in the source material. Our “heroes” make quips and punch the bad guys square in the face, but perhaps the film’s greatest strength lies in the examination of someone who could easily be called a bad guy himself.
Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach is just about the most interesting character you’ll come across in a superhero movie. He isn’t a virtuous symbol of freedom or wholesome American values. He’s a twisted mess of a person, barely able to function outside of his vigilantism. It’s not meant as an insult that Haley hasn’t come close to the performance he pulled off here, helped in no small part by this scene.
Rorschach is just one of many examples of Watchmen’s mature approach to the superhero genre, which it also appears to gleefully parody at times. Nothing pans out as you would expect, no hero leaves the movie without some kind of tarnish to their name, and the impossible mission to save the world in its finale proves to be just that.
The expectations of the audience are laughed off by Matthew Goode’s supremely smarmy Ozymandias, the jaded hero turned villain (or is he?). Having been trained by so many good-versus-evil movies over the years, the overcoming of the obstacles seems inevitable for our heroes. But then Ozymandias’ proud proclamation lets the viewer know, once and for all, that this isn’t your cookie cutter superhero spectacle:
“I’m not a comic book villain. Do you seriously think I would explain my master stroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it 35 minutes ago.”
Watchmen deserves to stand as the welcome antithesis to its safe, templated peers, and not as another example of the shortcomings of its director. If you feel your shoulders begin to slump as you trudge your way into the theater to watch the 956th retelling of Spider-man later this year, it’s easy to recommend an evening with a ragtag bunch of bastards and miscreants instead.
But yeah, that sex scene is fucking awful. You can have that one.
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