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| Copyright © 2009 by Zack Smith. All rights reserved.
Acting: *****
Watchmen is based on a comic book series, the author of which Alan Moore had his name removed from the credits. That in itself should tell you something. And yet, the movie trailer is so tempting... While the story is interesting, the superheroes are diverse and have unexpected looks and personalities, and the overall tone of the film is compellingly dark, deep and bleak, there is something missing. After sitting through this 2 hours, 50 minutes movie that could have been cut by at least a half-hour, I wish they had attended to its problems before subjecting the public to it. One particularly disturbing aspect to the story is the ending, which I consider the film's first major flaw. I won't tell you what it is, in case you don't know, however let's just say that it involves a "false flag" operation, i.e. one in which people die and the perpetrators pretend to be someone they are not in order to escape detection and cast blame on someone else. False flag ops have drawn a great deal of interest as of late, especially on the Web, because of course there have been so many in recent history including but not limited to:
The conclusion reached by the characters in Watchmen is that such false flag attacks are A-OK when perpetrated by an intelligent "pacifist" who has, all by himself, reasoned that killing a few million people in order to save humanity is somehow ethical. Of course, this is paltry shit-for-brains thinking. It is of a type that is dispensed with in the first few days of any Philosophy 101 course at your local community college. Looking beyond this major failing, the film and comic book are known for Alan Moore's "deconstruction of the comic book hero". By this it is meant that Moore is giving us a view of superheroes that is highly atypical. He is showing them as regular people with unusual powers who have to struggle to survive and sometimes that means doing sinful things and dumb things. I appreciate Moore's overcoming the superhero stereotype in this way, but this aspect, which is the comic book's strength, is rather poorly handled in the film and is thus a weakness. The mishandling manifests itself as poor character development. Some examples that you will notice in the film are as follows.
Thus the problem is, in movies one cannot just paint these people as having troubling or entertaining flaws, as the movie does. One has to explain the flaws at some point, lest they come to seem merely arbitrary choices, or perhaps flaws meant to bring shame. This failure to flesh out the characters, to explain them, is perhaps to be expected of a film translation of a comic book, but to me it is the second major failing of the film. Film is a different medium and has different requirements than comic books. We don't have time to imagine and reflect on weirdness or to savor it. Yet overall, it was worth the $5.50 that I paid for the bargain matinee. I give it three stars. Links
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