| Mar122009 | Watchmen |
To Zack Snyder and the rest of those who fought hard to see the Watchmen movie arrive on the big screen: I love you because you basically tricked a movie studio into financing a comic nerd wet dream. It’s like you were two drunk cougars out at the club and you managed to convince the DJ to play Funkytown and as soon as it spins up, everybody leaves the dance floor.
Watchmen is a very awesome comic book that flips a lot of superhero stereotypes on their head and it probably addressed the specter of the Cold War in a very accurate way. But in this brilliant post-Watchmen world that movie audiences have since grown up in where they have awesome things like The Dark Knight and no imminent threat of nuclear holocaust, it’s like trying to sell a Walkman at an Apple store.
Personally, I love the Watchmen comic and I heartily embrace the film as an homage; a swelling of adolescent nostalgia.
However, I think there’s not enough to ensnare a wider audience, to them it’s like a gore film with a costume fetish. They lovingly transliterated the book to the big screen, perfectly recreating shots and dialog and then they cut out everything to achieve a runtime of under 3 hours. But at some point the story shifted from being greater than a sum of its parts to just… the sum of its parts. I loved the attention to small detail but I think ultimately those who are not already “in the know” about the backstory will feel left out.
The songs used in the movie probably betray the most about the filmmakers. Songs so laughably cliché, the mood jumped back and forth between parody and cringe-induction therapy. Somewhere in the whole decision-making process, there must have been somebody with a nostalgia for oldies music so strong and so unstoppable that they were ignorant to the music’s wider cultural significance and subsequent overexposure. That sums up the whole film: a loving tribute to the classics but one that ignores how the world has changed around it.
In short: I love this movie for the beautiful niche that it fills but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend you see it. Unless you like large blue penises that are drawn by computer animators.
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