We have sensed a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of fan-boys suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. It’s a discombobulating sensation, one we must unhappily acknowledge as the new Watchmen movie.
Alan Moore has, of course, consistently maintained that his sprawling, seminal 1986 creation is inherently unfilmable; there is little in Zack Synder’s limp adaptation to contradict him. The lucky, educated viewer will trace the ghostly windowpane outline of the original comic onto this unholy alliance of tatty CGI and leaden exposition. The Alan Moore virgin, meanwhile, will be doomed to three dull, disorienting hours of a movie that might easily be taken for Mystery Men 2.
For the benefit of these wretched folks we say that Watchmen, in its graphic novel incarnation at least, offers a killer alternative history of the US, a jacked-up parallel 1980s with Richard Nixon in the White House, disobedience on the streets and a Cold War that’s about to go nuclear.
Humanity’s Hail Mary shot lies with a group of retired costumed vigilantes. Alas, this bastardised echo is the Justice League is under threat from an unidentified assassin, strife in the ranks and general skulduggery.
As a movie, this ought to coalesce into something special but the characters in Mr. Snyder’s uninspired rendering are never as substantial as their two-dimensional equivalents. The potentially volatile three-way romance between Patrick Wilson’s Christopher Reevesian Nite Owl, Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre and Billy Crudup’s Doctor Manhattan falls somewhere between moist soap opera sheet-grasping and Objectophilia, like a Valentine a toaster might send to a kettle. A scene depicting Doctor’s Manhattan’s godlike excursion into Vietnam – Wagner plays, helicopters rumble – displays an excruciating disregard of the fine line between homage and pastiche. And – oh yes – when somebody said that Watchmen was a dark affair, the lighting department chose to take them very, very literally.
It’s not all bad news. Though some of their co-stars are as useless as a yacht sale down the job centre, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is plenty menacing as The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley is genuinely outstanding as Rorschach. A breathtaking intro similarly hints at a much better film lurking within.
It should have been dazzling. It could have been dazzling. Who will watch the Watchmen? Only the opening weekend faithful, methinks.