Under the hood with Watchmen

By Faheem Ahmed     3/12/09 7:00pm

Oscar for "Best Trailer," then director Zack Snyder would have a couple of gleaming trophies sitting on his mantle. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, trailers used to be four minutes long, voiced over by a dude who sounded like he had emphysema and summarized the entire plot of the film.Enter the recently deceased Don LaFontaine: Using his deep iconic voice, LaFontaine single-handedly revolutionized the trailer concept. Since then trailers have become much tighter, featuring quick, exciting montages and samples of some of the best scenes from the film in an effort to garner audience interest. Snyder has absolutely perfected this method.

His trailers for 300 and Watchmen are a dizzying blend of breathtaking visuals (hundreds of Persians falling off a cliff, Rorschach kicking down a door), action scenes and, most importantly, epic musical scores. The music used for each of the Watchmen trailers sampled the old-school (Smashing Pumpkins) and the new-school (Muse), resulting in an awesome sequence that assaulted the eyes and ears. Ultimately, it does what any trailer is supposed to do: make us excited.

In fact, my excitement for the film was so great that it prompted me to sit down and read Alan Moore's graphic novel, hailed as one of the greatest graphic novels ever written. Well, suffice it to say, the novel was pretty weird. Most book adaptations are criticized for straying too far from the source material. For Watchmen, the problem was the exact opposite. Snyder actually followed the graphic novel too closely, resulting in a film that was emotionally disjointed and had poor character development.

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Don't get me wrong: There are certainly scenes that are absolutely mesmerizing. The transformation of New York City, Rorschach's fight scenes and the state-of-the art computer generated Dr. Manhattan, seen in all his naked glory, are amazing highlights of the film. Watchmen is a very beautiful movie to watch, but it appears as if Snyder and his team spent all their time and money developing the way the movie looked, rather than investing in the actual characters. By the end of the three-hour movie, the audience could barely give a crap about the budding romance between Malin Ackerman's (Heartbreak Kid) Silk Spectre II and Patrick Wilson's (Lakeview Terrace) Nite Owl II.

A majority of the flaws for the movie lie in the sound and visual editing. Comic books and graphic novels can take liberties by constantly jumping between various plot lines and time periods. Movies, on the other hand, should have relatively linear timelines. Watchmen sloppily recounts pages of history from the graphic novel in a couple of short montages and jumps too often between characters without giving the audience time to digest what they have just seen.

The music and the slow-motion are also used erratically. The low point of the film is a horrible slow-mo sex scene between Ackerman and Wilson set to a horrendous rendition of the song "Hallelujah." Sounds awesome on paper, right? Um, no.

Despite its glaring weaknesses, Watchmen is saved from being another mediocre comic book movie by an exceptional performance by Jackie Earle Haley (Semi-Pro) as Rorschach. Haley steals the show by infusing a shape-shifting mask and a gruff, monotone voice with terrifying fear and uncompromising virtue. Similar to Batman, he is a great example of the anti-hero, someone who relies on brutal violence to achieve his goals.

Watchmen deserves a single trip to the theater to marvel at Snyder's visual delights, but clearly falls short of the high bar raised by The Dark Knight, the greatest comic book adaptation to date.

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