Here, too, be howlers: A sex scene between Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) inside the former’s flying-owl craft, set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” almost ruins the song and the film in under three minutes Dr. Nobody who saw 300 would mistake Snyder for a nuanced, Bergmanesque dramatist, but his not-quite-mature understanding of the human condition (super- or otherwise) does Moore’s characterization a disservice. The direction, by contrast, suffers from an overly static camera (to evoke still comic panels) and an occasional mishandling of the deep melancholy and creeping nihilism of these “heroic” characters. The production design is fantastic: Its obsessive re-creation of the color palette, costumes, and set pieces of the graphic novel should satisfy the most hardened Gibbons devotee. However, if you are new to the plot and characters, Snyder’s fidelity to the complex, discursive, time-jumping comic may strike you as slow, confusing, and needlessly portentous. If you already know and worship the original (I do), there’s no denying the adolescent thrill in seeing these aging, morally ambiguous, all-too-human superheroes brought to life. This is both good and bad-again, depending on your ardor for the source material-and is the reason for the wildly mixed reviews Snyder’s adaptation has received. Directed by 300’s Zack Snyder (2006) with an ur-fanboy’s attention to seamless mimicry, Watchmen the movie is-barring an altered ending and the deletion of the paratexts that lend the comic its peerless density-as close to an illuminated manuscript of Moore and Gibbons’s vision as anyone had a right to expect. Your response to the film will have almost everything to do with whether you are already intimate (and in love) with Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons’s original comic (published in a twelve-issue run from 1986 through 1987). Manhattan (Billy Crudup), and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).ĪFTER DECADES OF DEVELOPMENT HELL at multiple studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros.), the protracted attachments of several directors (Terry Gilliam, Paul Greengrass, Darren Aronofsky), and the subsequent disenchantment and self-erasure of its source author (Alan Moore), Watchmen, the so-called Citizen Kane of graphic novels, has finally hit movie screens on a wave of Hollywood hype and fan expectation. Zack Snyder, Watchmen, 2009, color film in 35 mm, 163 minutes.
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