Dark Visions
“Watchmen” and “Leave Her to Heaven.”
by Anthony Lane
March 9, 2009 Text Size:
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Keywords
“Watchmen”; “Leave Her to Heaven?”; Zack Snyder; John M. Stahl; Graphic Novels; Alan Moore; Billy Crudup The world of the graphic novel is a curious one. For every masterwork, such as “Persepolis” or “Maus,” there seem to be shelves of cod mythology and rainy dystopias, patrolled by rock-jawed heroes and their melon-breasted sidekicks. Fans of the stuff are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match. One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.” Both of these have been turned into motion pictures; the first was merely an egregious waste of money, time, and talent, whereas the second was not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch. In each case, the cry from readers was that the movie was doomed by its treacherous departure from the original; Moore distanced himself from both productions, and he has done so again with the new adaptation of “Watchmen.” The movie was written by David Hayter and Alex Tse, and directed by Zack Snyder, but nowhere do we see the name of Moore.

The bad news about “Watchmen” is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don’t have to stay past the opening credit sequence—easily the highlight of the film. In contrast to all that follows, it tells its tale briskly, showing how a bunch of crime-fighters formed a secret club known as the Minutemen, who in turn were succeeded by the Watchmen. This entails a whisk through history from the nineteen-forties to the eighties, with shots of masked figures shaking hands with John F. Kennedy, posing with Andy Warhol, and so forth; these are staged like Annie Leibovitz setups, and, indeed, just to ram home the in-joke, we later see a Leibovitz look-alike behind a camera. But must we have “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” in the background? How long did it take the producers to arrive at that imaginative choice? And was Dylan happy to lend his name to a project from which all tenderness has been excised, and which prefers to paint mankind as a bevy of brutes?

As far as superheroes go, two’s company but three or more is a drag, with no single character likely to secure our attention: just ask the X-Men, or the Fantastic Four, or the half-dozen Watchmen we get here. There is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a slip of a psychopath, his face often obscured by a bandagelike mask, on which inky patches constantly blot and re-form. There is Dan (Patrick Wilson), better known as Nite Owl, who keeps his old superhero outfit, rubbery and sharp-eared, locked away in his basement, presumably for fear of being sued for plagiarism by Bruce Wayne. There is the Comedian, real name Eddie Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose tragic end, early in the film, we are invited to mourn, but who gets his revenge by popping up in innumerable flashbacks. There is Laurie, who goes by the sobriquet of Silk Spectre, as if hoping to become a top-class shampoo; she is played by Malin Akerman, whose line readings suggest that she is slightly defeated by the pressure of pretending to be one person, let alone two. Then there is Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), who likes to be called Ozymandias. Goode played Charles Ryder in last year’s “Brideshead Revisited,” and I fear that, even as Ozymandias murders millions from his Antarctic lair, which he does at the climax of “Watchmen,” Goode’s floppy blond locks and swallowed consonants remain those of a young gadabout who might, at worst, twist the leg off his Teddy bear.


from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisLast and hugest is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is buff, buck naked, and blue, like a porn star left overnight in a meat locker. Whether his fellow-Watchmen have true superpowers, as opposed to a pathological bent for fisticuffs, I never quite worked out, but this guy is the real deal. He was once a physicist, but, after an unfortunate mishap, he found himself reintegrated as a radioactive being, equipped to peer into the future, nip to Mars for the afternoon, and divide into multiples of himself for nuclear-powered group sex. I felt sorry for Crudup, a thoughtful actor forced to spout gibberish about the meaning of time and, much worse, to have that lovely shy smile of his wiped by special effects. Dr. Manhattan is central to Moore’s chronological conceit, which is that President Nixon (Robert Wisden), having used our blue friend to annihilate the Vietcong, wins the Vietnam War and, by 1985—the era in which the bulk of the tale takes place—is somehow serving a third term.

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along. The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon. The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead. You want to see the attempted rape of a superwoman, her bright latex costume cast aside and her head banged against the baize of a pool table? The assault is there in Moore’s book, one panel of which homes in on the blood that leaps from her punched mouth, but the pool table is Snyder’s own embroidery. You want to hear Moore’s attempt at urban jeremiad? “This awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of slowed children.” That line from the book may be meant as a punky retread of James Ellroy, but it sounds to me like a writer trying much, much too hard; either way, it makes it directly into the movie, as one of Rorschach’s voice-overs. (And still the adaptation won’t be slavish enough for some.) Amid these pompous grabs at horror, neither author nor director has much grasp of what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, or what pity should attend it; they are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights. In the end, with a gaping pit where New York used to be, most of the surviving Watchmen agree that the loss of the Eastern Seaboard was a small price to pay for global peace. Incoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, “Watchmen” marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go?

Anung Un Rama wrote:I
Some People just shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. I mean, of course she can have a different opinion about the movie, but if you read how she responded to some of the comments, I'm starting to doubt her journalistic credibility.

Dogs fighting over, tearing apart, and eating a six-year-old girl--we're shown them chowing down on and tearing apart the remaining leg and leg bone, with the sock and shoe still on the bone as the dogs wrestle over it;

* A close up of man repeatedly getting an axe-blade driven through his skull while he's being butchered;

* At least two very graphic scenes of naked superhero "Dr. Manhattan" vaporizing people to just blood, limbs, and guts hanging from the ceiling or spread in the snow;

* Many scenes of Dr. Manhattan's computer generated penis swinging about;

* A kid biting a giant, bloody chunk of flesh out of another kid's face--he grows up to be "Rorschach," one of the superheroes' compatriots;

* A man's hands and arms being sawed off with an electric saw--we're shown the bloody stumps and the bloody sawed off limbs in close up shots;

* A man with vat of hot french fry oil deliberately thrown over his head--we literally see him fry, and he ultimately dies, we're told (no kidding);

* Many, many scenes of people's hands, arms, fingers being broken in half or crunched by the "superheroes";

* Cops being set on fire and burning to death by superhero compatriot "Rorschach;"

* Superhero "The Comedian" (a bad Robert Downey, Jr. look-alike) brutally beating and raping another superhero--tis movie concludes that the rape was a good thing b/c the slutty superhero had a slutty superhero daughter from him;

* Superhero "The Comedian" shooting and killing a Vietnamese woman because she's pregnant with his kid;

* Superhero "The Comedian" being thrown off a roof of a tall building--we see his body hit the ground and the blood flow out;

* Two superheroes have an explicit sex scene in a spaceship--she's on top, then he's on top, awesome--you can teach your young kids multiple sexual positions before they even reach puberty, by taking them to see this (there's a less explicit sex scene between the slutty superheroine and another superhero not long before that).

And these are just the highlights, plus superheroes hurling obscenities--great for the kiddies. There's so much more--along with horrible make-up, bad acting, and terrible computer generated images (including the penis). Not to mention, a bad, extremely slow, and boring script.

Frazzled wrote:

Are these items actually scenes in the movie?

Dogs fighting over, tearing apart, and eating a six-year-old girl--we're shown them chowing down on and tearing apart the remaining leg and leg bone, with the sock and shoe still on the bone as the dogs wrestle over it;

* A close up of man repeatedly getting an axe-blade driven through his skull while he's being butchered;

* At least two very graphic scenes of naked superhero "Dr. Manhattan" vaporizing people to just blood, limbs, and guts hanging from the ceiling or spread in the snow;

* Many scenes of Dr. Manhattan's computer generated penis swinging about;

* A kid biting a giant, bloody chunk of flesh out of another kid's face--he grows up to be "Rorschach," one of the superheroes' compatriots;

* A man's hands and arms being sawed off with an electric saw--we're shown the bloody stumps and the bloody sawed off limbs in close up shots;

* A man with vat of hot french fry oil deliberately thrown over his head--we literally see him fry, and he ultimately dies, we're told (no kidding);

* Many, many scenes of people's hands, arms, fingers being broken in half or crunched by the "superheroes";

* Cops being set on fire and burning to death by superhero compatriot "Rorschach;"

* Superhero "The Comedian" (a bad Robert Downey, Jr. look-alike) brutally beating and raping another superhero--tis movie concludes that the rape was a good thing b/c the slutty superhero had a slutty superhero daughter from him;

* Superhero "The Comedian" shooting and killing a Vietnamese woman because she's pregnant with his kid;

* Superhero "The Comedian" being thrown off a roof of a tall building--we see his body hit the ground and the blood flow out;

* Two superheroes have an explicit sex scene in a spaceship--she's on top, then he's on top, awesome--you can teach your young kids multiple sexual positions before they even reach puberty, by taking them to see this (there's a less explicit sex scene between the slutty superheroine and another superhero not long before that).

And these are just the highlights, plus superheroes hurling obscenities--great for the kiddies. There's so much more--along with horrible make-up, bad acting, and terrible computer generated images (including the penis). Not to mention, a bad, extremely slow, and boring script.

If so, glad I passed.

namegoeshere wrote:The Graphic novel is overrated

namegoeshere wrote:I said the graphic novel was so-so.

namegoeshere wrote:The Graphic novel is overrated - some super big fans of it, drown out so many nonplussed (I'm nonplussed). Rorsch is a great character, if it was just hte Rorsch comic I would have loved it - the rest just so-so

Ahtman wrote:

namegoeshere wrote:The Graphic novel is overrated

namegoeshere wrote:I said the graphic novel was so-so.

It would appear you said something different then what you thought you said.

focusedfire wrote:
If someone thinks there kids can handle it, thats there right to take them without hassle. Of course, it might be wise to preview the movie first but once done its their right to guide their children in the manner they see fit(within reason).

Green Blow Fly wrote:Daredevil was a movie I liked because I could relate to the character and Ben Afleck did a fantastic job in the starring role.

Polonius wrote:I'm guessing Doc's penis was simply the easiest way for the film to convey how detached he's gotten from humanity: not only is he nude and flapping, but nobody seems to care or point it out.

stonefox wrote:
giant blue junk for a majority of the movie

stonefox wrote:Sure, the movie’s not so subtle homoerotic content will draw in gay viewers as it did Snyder’s 300.