Watchmen stops time

In theaters Friday: Aliens in the Attic, The Collector, Funny People

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Fast & Furious, Miss March

Warner Bros. officials have said that if Christopher Nolan does not return for a follow-up to The Dark Knight, that Zack Snyder could possibly replace him. Okay, now I am nervous.

This review is going to be inversely proportionate to how long watching Snyder’s Watchmen felt. Here’s the backstory (and believe me, there’s tons of it, because 90% of this movie is backstory): Based on Alan Moore’s best-selling comic book series, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985. While police investigate the brutal murder of Edward Blake—a man who doubles as a vigilante called The Comedian—another masked vigilante called Rorschach looks into it on his own, believing the U.S. government is working covertly to eliminate all superhero crime fighters. Meanwhile, the only guy with actual superpowers is an emotionally-detached, blue ghost-like Superman named Dr. Manhattan, and he gets accused of causing cancer, so he flees to Mars. Why? Because that’s where super heroes go for some “me time.” Problem is, without Dr. Manhattan’s aid, the U.S. weakens internationally and Russia grows stronger, which brings the Cold War to the edge of Nuclear Holocaust. So while Rorschach and his masked friends face extermination, Dr. Manhattan must face his own demons and decide if or how to help a world he no longer needs.

That’s a decent premise for the film now out on DVD, but director Snyder’s sledgehammer direction and a sagging, pompous screenplay kill any originality or inventiveness that Moore’s comic books may have had. No wonder Moore had this recent exchange with Entertainment Weekly:

EW: Don’t you have the slightest curiosity about what Watchmen director Zack Snyder is doing with your work?

MOORE: I would rather not know.

EW: He’s supposed to be a very nice guy.

MOORE: He may very well be, but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid.

Ouch. Well, Moore may have sour grapes, but he’s also not wrong. Malin Akerman’s performance as Silk Spectre II is as thin and plastic as her black latex tights, Patrick Wilson looks and sounds like he ought to be running a Dungeons & Dragons shop instead of fighting crime, and, if we’re going to be ‘80s-specific, Billy Crudup infuses Dr. Manhattan with the personality of an Apple IIC. That’s not to say Watchmen is a complete disaster. Snyder does capture a few thrilling-but-brief fight sequences, though what could have been a thrilling prison break wheezes at a confounding pace. Jackie Earl Haley’s Rorschach grabbed hold of my attention every second he was on screen. Even his Sam Spade trench coat and ever-shifting ink-blot mask form the most interesting get-up in the film, but it is his performance–his gravelly voice-overs and his tragic story arc–that offer a flicker of hope in an otherwise train wreck of a film. If they announced a Rorschach spin-off tomorrow, I would give him another chance.

After Brazil, Terry Gilliam tried adapting Watchmen in the late 1980s, but gave up on it. Maybe Snyder should have done the same.