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'Watchmen' a film made only for fans of novel

By Daniel Neman

Media General News Service

Published: March 5, 2009

The most unintentionally hilarious moment in "Watchmen"? There are so many to choose from, so very many.

But it would have to be the love scene played out on a desert planet at sundown, the two naked lovers standing and kissing in front of a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud.

How romantic. But this is the best part: It's only a dream!

The next love scene — same two lovers, but real this time — takes place on a hovering spacecraft thing in front of a full moon, with Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" blaring on the soundtrack.

Really. If the music seems to be heavy-handed ("Ride of the Valkyries" during a Vietnam flashback — now there's an original idea — "The Times They Are a Changin' " over a montage showing how times are a-changing, Mozart's "Requiem" at a dramatic climax), it's because the whole movie is heavy-handed.

Director Zack Snyder, the man who gave us "300," feels compelled to hit every point as hard as he can. He can't just film a sad scene, he adds rain and dramatic flashes of lightning and some appropriately somber song such as "The Sounds of Silence" at a funeral.

It is as if he does not trust the audi-ence to understand what is happening without his help. He must think we're stupid.

Competing with Snyder in the ineptitude sweepstakes are writers David Hayter and Alex Tse, whose boring script is bizarrely overwritten. In excruciating and infuriatingly repetitive detail, they give us the back story of far too many characters, but almost no information about the tiny part of the film that counts as the current plot.

We learn from the "The Times They Are a Changin' " montage that superheroes who were once popular have fallen out of favor and been banned by the government. One — the man who assassinated JFK, by the way — is killed, and the others begin to suspect that someone is trying to kill them all.

Then they have a lot of flashbacks. During the one guy's funeral alone, three of them have flashbacks.

The filmmakers do not give us enough reason to care about any of them. One (Ozymandias? Can his superhero name really be Ozymandias?) is barely in the film. Another, played by Patrick Wilson, is never identified by his superhero name, but his costume looks sort of like Batman.

The point is, the filmmakers expect us to know who these people are and to care about them, because they expect us already to know the source material, a graphic novel by Alan Moore. This is a movie made only for the existing fans, who may very well love it.

They will certainly appreciate the production design, which appears to be lifted directly from the graphic novel. So much effort went into the design that little was left for what matters most in a movie, like the plot. And the pace. And the acting. And the editing. And the coherence.

What we get is production design. That, and some appallingly gratuitous hyper-violence, gratuitous slow-motion shots and gratuitous hyper-violence shot in slow motion.

All of that slow motion makes a slow movie seem even slower. The embarrassing inability to come to a conclusion — or rather, to pick one final ending out of the 10 or 12 it attempts — makes it worse.
"Watchmen" clocks in at 2 1/2 hours, if you leave during the credits. But it feels much, much longer.