It’s finally official: The superhero film is no longer the sole property of the comic book fan. It started with Iron Man, culminated with The Dark Knight and is now solidified with Watchmen.
No longer are comic book films just exercises in stylized action, in telling a story one frame at a time. Rather, they are deep, dark, intelligent, penetrating psychological and socially conscious dramas. If the Dark Knight was the film to turn society inside out and look beneath collectively ingrained perceptions of good and evil, Watchmen takes it one step further, tearing society to shreds and rebuilding it from the ground up. There's never been a film quite like this before.
Third Time's A Charm for Zack Snyder
Watchmen works for all the same reasons that director Zack Snyder’s last film 300 didn’t. It possesses all the same qualities: big, bold, violent, obscene, and visually stunning. But it’s not empty-headed like 300: all style and no substance.
It lives and breathes, it seethes intelligence and emotion along the corners of it’s every frame and, most important: it tells six or seven completely different yet thoroughly engaging stories with absolute clarity and symbolic resonance.
This is not a film. It is, like the graphic novel it is based on, a cultural document that will live forever because its social significance will never grow stale. It is, above all else, a specific and precise mirror of our times.
Bringing Alan Moore's Work to Life
The film begins in the 1980s. Nixon is in his third term as president and the world is on the brink of Armageddon as the Russians gear up to take out America with nuclear weapons.
Nixon, for reasons deserving much contemplation, has passed a bill, outlawing costumed heroes, sending them all into retirement.
When one of them, The Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), who walks a very thin line between hero and sociopath is killed, another, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is led to believe that someone is killing off costumed heroes.
The Watchmen
Rorschach is thus prompted to warn his fellow crime fighters Silk Specter II (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl, the world’s smartest man Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) and the U.S.’s top weapon against the threat of nuclear assault Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), whose particles were broken down in a freak accident and reassembled on a sub-quantum level, bringing him back as a large blue being whom, despite being in a relationship with Silk Specter, exists on a plane totally separate from human interaction.
He can teleport, change his size, see the future, you name it: He’s the closet proof in the potential existence of a god that this world has ever seen.
Putting Substance First
What is remarkable about the film is how little of it actually revolves around action. Rather it is not a film about good vs. evil (whether or not it even has a villain at all is left entirely up to debate), but how these characters function under a specific governance at a specific point in history.
Their actions are defined, not by superpowers as most heroes are, but almost entirely by the parameters set for them by the society with which they are integrated within.
The Superhero in Society
Therefore, this film, more than any other superhero film, shatters and reconstructs the true meaning behind the mythos and ethos of the superhero. In Watchmen, the superhero is not necessarily the person who saves the day from evildoers. Rather they are all people, struggling with making conscious decisions, living in the public eye and then dealing with being shunned away from it.
Each character is drawn with the depth and complexity of a real person facing these seemingly impossible questions. There are no heroes here, only men and women struggling to make the right decisions in a world that seems to have gone terribly wrong.
Plot
So there’s no point in describing the plot in any more depth because the film is not simple enough to be bogged down by conventional storytelling, having no real linear narrative flow. The plot is a means to work out concepts and realizations that are far more startling and symbolic than a typical comic book film would ever have the courage to be.
Verdict
It is therefore the case, and testament to its brilliance, that Watchmen cannot be easily defined or described, especially within such a limited number of words, because it is so much more than just an exercise in filmmaking style. Rather it is a living organism that thinks and breathes and feels all on its own. A piece of culture that skewers and dissects the world we live in, exposing all of its ugly and painful deficiencies.
Like The Dark Knight, the film does not pass judgment or provide easy answers. Is the film devastating or optimistic? What is the value of human life, if there is any, or are we all just punch lines at the butt of some cruel cosmic joke, living in a world where the people supposed to protect us could end up being our greatest threat?
Watchmen is not an easy film, or a particularly bright one. To be sure, it is packed with action and is constructed by a truly gifted stylist. But those are not the things audiences will leave the theater with.
They will leave discussing metaphors and allegories, realizations about the roles of good and evil within society, whether or not it is harmful or a necessity to put romantic belief into a symbol like a superhero.
For all those who thought, up to this point, that comic book films were just kids fair, cartoons in motion meant to keep teenagers occupied, this is the film you’ve been waiting for.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Mike Lippert - I am 22 years old and am currently living in the small town of Walkerton Ontario. I Spent fours years at Wilfed Laurier University in ...
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