L I S A   M O R T O N		M I C H A E L   M A R A N O
Watchmen (the movie) starts with a logo sequence done in stark yellow and black, mirroring the bloodied smiley face button that's become as iconic as the scrawled letter "A" in a circle. But there's another pop culture artifact that's also yellow and black, and that could be equally applied to director Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal graphic novel: Cliffs Notes. Yeah, those little bumblebee-colored booklets that condense great works of literature down into a few cram-worthy pages, offering up little beyond plot reductions for students too apathetic or braindead to actually read the full books. Watching Watchmen is a strange and frequently frustrating experience, like being condemned to Cliffs Notes when you wanted to read a great book. Snyder and his screenwriters have done one smart thing with their film: They've acknowledged that Alan Moore is a better, smarter writer than any of them, and so they've stuck closely to his original Watchmen (this is, in fact, the most faithful of any of the Alan Moore adaptations, which have varied from the nearly-unrecognizable From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the half-and-half realm of V for Vendetta). A whopping 95% of Watchmen's dialogue is taken right out of the comic; no new characters have been added, no major plot points completely changed. Yes, the ending has been altered, but they've managed to use chunks of Moore's script in explaining the new ending, and it works. What doesn't work is the same thing that's missing from Cliff's Notes: The style. The emotion. And the very point of the thing. Because Alan Moore's Watchmen was a deconstruction of the superhero myth. And Zack Snyder's Watchmen—simply by lengthening and changing a few visual sequences—is instead a misguided celebration of superheroics. Moore's protagonists are "masked vigilantes", severely neurotic and damaged folk who (with the exception of Dr. Manhattan) possess no extraordinary powers and limited fighting skills. In Moore's comic, the sociopathic Rorschach leaps out a window at one point to escape a set-up, bounces off a trashcan on the way down, and lands in a crumpled heap; in Snyder's film, the same sociopath leaps out of the same window, but drops at least two stories to land on his feet and engage in several seconds of carefully choreographed fighting before he's brought down. Snyder has just turned this character into a true superhero, a depiction that is completely at odds with the script, which still persists in telling us that Rorschach is a sociopath. Of course there is a true sociopath at work in Watchmen, but it's not Rorschach—or any other character on screen, for that matter. Instead it's the director who insists on instilling every action scene with some of the most heavily fetishized violence splattered on screen since . . . well, since his last film 300. In the comic, after Rorschach is captured and sent to prison, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre decide to break him out of a prison, and one panel—ONE PANEL—depicts them fighting as they make their way through a riot to reach Rorschach. In Snyder's film, however, they fight dozens of prisoners, executing impossibly perfect martial arts maneuvers that result in gallons of blood spraying everywhere, all in glorious slow-motion (don't get me started on this director's over-use of slow-motion, either—I haven't been this annoyed by a filmmaker's repetitive use of a camera device since Chang Cheh latched onto the zoom lens in all those Shaw Brothers movies). Watchmen, at times, is in fact downright disgusting: When Dr. Manhattan is seen in a flashback taking out some bad guys in a nightclub, Snyder insists on presenting a shot of entrails and tendons dripping from a ceiling. Moore's vigilantes were, literally, impotent, but Snyder's are mythologized so severely that the audience is clearly meant to find them awe-inspiring, even while they're generating more bloodshed than a dozen Jasons or Freddys. It's a view of heroes that's almost completely at odds with Moore's vision, and thus with the script for the film itself. It leaves the film with a big emotional and logical gap that it can never fill. But damn, that story is still there, and it's still compelling enough to justify a 2 hour and 40 minute running time. The cast is very good, for the most part; even Jackie Earle Haley's Batman-ish growl as Rorschach works after a while, and his performance is very good indeed, especially when the mask finally comes off (literally). Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter (aka Silk Spectre I) does an especially fine job of capturing the peculiar psychology of an aging costumed crimefighter, showing us the woman's brittleness and drunken nostalgia. The mostly-CGI-rendered Dr. Manhattan is surprisingly engaging, thanks in no small part to Billy Crudup's performance. Watchmen also benefits from all the effects and production design we've come to expect from big movies. Manhattan's sojourn on Mars is visually sumptuous (because, of course, it hues closely to Dave Gibbons' original artwork) and even supporting characters from the comic like Bubastis, the genetically-enhanced lynx, are effective. Less effective is the film's use of music. Tyler Bates has provided a decent score, and Watchmen would have been much better off had it stuck to that; unfortunately it's tried to create some sort of tapestry by using a mix-and-match crazy quilt of songs and existing musical cues, everything from Ride of the Valkyries (oh dear God, used during a Viet Nam war battle scene, no less) to a KC and the Sunshine Band track over a riot (perhaps the single worst use of a song in a movie ever). In fact, after a few of these inept song placements you might find yourself cringing whenever you hear the opening strains of a new cue. And yet, despite all its flaws, Watchmen can't be entirely dismissed. It's ultimately too ham-handed and dishonest to pass as any sort of new classic in the genre of superhero movies, but it's still a pleasure to watch the competent (and occasionally superb) cast recite Moore's lines in Gibbons' visual world. The original graphic novel was one of those rarest of art forms: A true work of genius, one that transcended its genre's limitations and recreated that genre forever. The novel's complexity and richness were, as has frequently been noted, unfilmable . . . but they were ripe for a Cliffs Notes treatment. And as Cliffs Notes go, it's not the worst. Click here and scroll down for Lisa Morton's bio.		So, what's it mean to be a "commercial director" these days? When I was a kid in the omigod-Mikey-from-the-Life-Cereal-ads-died-from-Pop-Rocks-and-Soda 1970s, a "commercial director" was a person who made . . . y'know . . . commercial movies. Because back then, there was a difference between "Art Movies" (usually with subtitles), "Auteur Movies" (think Coppola, Friedkin, Peckinpah) and regular movies, "Commercial Movies", that you paid money to just be entertained by for a couple of hours in theaters that still permitted cigarette smoking (think your basic disaster movies). Hey . . . anybody remember the unique shade of Virgin Mary Blue that cigarette smoke took back then, when the beam of a movie theater projector would refract through it? The first time I can remember noticing that was during a matinee of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. I can only assume the smoke was generated by the puffings of Mrs. Robinson-like moms who'd taken their kids and who looked at the young Kurt Russell whistfully as they thought of their pool boys. But I digress . . . . Nowadays, I'm having trouble figuring out just what the fuck a "commercial director" is, 'cuz commercial directors (as in, people who make commercial movies) now are thought of as Auteurs of the Coppola/Herzog stripe, when, in fact, all they fucking are is commercial directors . . . as in . . . guys who direct commercials. Don't get me wrong, George Romero started out as a director of commercials, and so did Ridley Scott and David Fincher. But our current batch of Commercial Auteurs can't seem to transcend the 30-second blipvert mentality that first got them into meetings with producers in offices in which the air conditioning, mineral water, and aortal blood flow of the participants were all the same temperature. Michael Bay doesn't have a basic idea of the syntax of film. None of his movies make any sense, except on a purely visual level. Watch The Island and try to figure out the chronology of the movie. If you can come up with a cogent timeline, based on night shots and day shots and dialogue, I'll give you a dollar. Pearl Harbor makes no sense—characters are in multiple places at the same time. Cinematically speaking, Gore Verbinsky's Pirates of the Caribbean sequels are gibberish. (Though to be fair to Verbinsky, he is capable of telling a story, once in a while.) Everything in those sequels is all about isolated visual moments. I'll refrain from using the word "climax", as that term typically applies to things with plots, but a "big scene near the end" revolves around a church with a millwheel (why the fuck would a church have a millwheel?) on the top of a hill (why would anyone put a millwheel at the top of a hill, where there'd be no downhill water flow to drive the wheel?). Marcus Nispel doesn't understand the slasher movies he remakes. His Pathfinder had no path. It was just a bunch of scenes laid out in sequence, with no sense of urgency or narrative arc. All of which brings me, of course, to Zack Snyder's Watchmen. I'm going to just dig into this review without talking too much about the particulars of Watchmen, as I assume if you're reading this, you know this stuff already. There's no denying that Snyder's montage/credit sequence (set to Bob Dylan) that brings the viewer up-to-date with the alternate 1985 in which his Watchmen takes place is brilliant. In fact, it's really beautiful—a visual poem that takes us through a WWII in which Flying Forts have portraits of super-heroine Sally Jupiter painted on their noses, a Factory in which Andy Warhol does portraits of masked vigilantes and a late 1970s in which superheroes are among the beautiful people who go to Studio 54. But didja notice that this visual poem doesn't have any . . . uhmmmmm . . . words? Snyder sells us on his alternate history the way he sold us cars and Nike sneakers: with technologically ingenious pyrotechnics. He's selling a premise, not telling a story. Narrative considerations like plot, theme, pacing, characterization aren't skills you have to hone when you learn your craft as a director of commercials. Which is why Snyder sucks so bad at them. Alan Moore, creator of the magnificent Watchmen graphic novel, has suggested that storytelling is a kind of magic. Snyder is, in this context, a bit of a muggle. There's a great moment in the graphic novel when Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl, and Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Silk Spectre, are confronted by street toughs in an alley after being forced into superhero retirement, and their old ass-kicking skills come back to them and they beat the shit of their assailants. In Moore's skilled hands, this scene is a moment of rediscovery, in which two people out of the game for years realize they "still got it" and bond with each other as they try to catch their breath. In Synder's gelatinous pseudopods, the scene is just a fucking melee. It loses its point without that moment of rediscovery. He amped the fight, but missed the point of it. Integral to Watchmen is a sense of apocalyptic doom, of the Cold War coming to a brutal climax. (Oops! I used that word "climax", didn't I? That thing that applies to a carefully constructed plot. Sorry!) In fact, the entire oeuvre of this "visionary director" so far is apocalyptic, from the zombie holocaust of his Dawn of the Dead remake to the neo-fascist homoerotic jerk-off fantasy of his 300. But as apocalypse is bad for business, especially for the advertizing industry, Snyder fails at this miserably for the third time. Watchmen doesn't feel like the end of the world, even though apocalypse is a plot point. The most Snyder can muster for evoking the End of the World is having Nena on the soundtrack. In Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the End of the World is evoked artfully and convincingly through the chaos of a local news station as lines of communication break down. In Donnie Darko, the End of the World is evoked artfully and convincingly through a guy standing around in a Bunny suit. Snyder has 200 million dollars to make the world feel like it's about to shit the bed, and he flops. I don't know what percentage of Watchmen is devoted to backstory, but at the two-hour mark, we're still getting huge undigestible cinderblocks of exposition and flashback. We don't need the entire life-and-afterlife story of Dr. Manhattan to be told that he's become distanced from humanity, when this could just be shown this via his otherness. Or, would that take a command of that pesky storytelling skill? Snyder does get a few things down really well. The first half hour of the movie is pretty great, but by minute number 40, the movie dies before your eyes. The stuff with Rorschach is pretty good, and a lot of that has to do with the pretty goddam magnificent performance of Jackie Earle Haley. But ultimately, a guy whose best work is done in 30 second bursts that look pretty good on an iPod screen is doomed to have his ass kicked by what is generally considered not only one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, but one of the greatest novels of all time. The cruel fact is, when comes to adapting a big, sprawling, thematically complex literary work, Snyder can't match the skill demonstrated by the writers of Wishbone, that 1990s PBS show about the Jack Russell terrier who'd imagine himself to be the lead character in various classic works of literature. What's more, those episodes of Wishbone were only 20 minutes long, which might be the length of a few of Snyder's superfluous flashbacks. You know what I really liked about watching Wishbone on PBS? No commercials. Coincidence? You decide. Click here and scroll down for Michael Marano's bio. Above photo by Theresa DeLucci

Click below to read Lisa's and Mike's (and before that Mike's and Gemma Files') other throw-downs: