new release - ¦ ¦- WATCHMEN - ¦ ¦- 5/10 - ¦ ¦- ‘Black Freighter’ review added 19.12.09
original 1980 Watchmen 'concept art' : (L-R) Nite Owl II; Silk Spectre I;
Dr Manhattan; Silk Spectre II (front); Ozymandias (back); Nite Owl I; (front R) Bubastis
It's Dental Floss … of the mind!
Who – will – baby – sit – the – baby – sitters?
The Power of Lard
"Paceless and oddly lacking in suspense," I wrote in March 2004, "Dawn [of the Dead] has barely a couple of genuinely tense scenes in its whole running-time. There's [...] a civil-disturbance bit [...] shot rather like a race-riot, one of a handful of moments where [director, Zack] Snyder and [scriptwriter, James] Gunn seem to be groping for some kind of deeper political or social angle, only to see it slip through their fingers each and every time. The gore quotient is fairly high, but, apart from one chain-saw mishap, never especially shocking or inventive [...]"
Half a decade on and it's a disappointingly similar story with Snyder's latest offering, the wildly ambitious graphic-novel adaptation Watchmen. This time the screenplay is by David Hayter – who also wrote or co-wrote the first two X-Men movies – and feature-debutant Alex Tse, but once again there's a distinct sense that Snyder has bitten off much more than he's able to chew (and is it coincidental that the X-Man entry, The Last Stand, was the only one Hayter wasn't involved with?)
Snyder famously obtained the much-coveted Watchmen gig after the unexpectedly blockbusting success of 300, which was also adapted from a graphic novel – Frank Miller's recounting of the Battle of Thermopylae. But in that instance the picture's deficiencies could be excused by the fact that what we were seeing was explicitly a work of propaganda: framed as a narrative told by a survivor of the battle in order to inspire his nation's troops immediately before their next major conflict.
There's no similar get-out with Watchmen, which presents a dystopian alternative version of 1985 in which the USA – still led by President Nixon (in his fifth term, having been able to abolish White House "term limits" thanks to his success in the Vietnam war) – is poised on the brink of all-out nuclear war with the USSR. Mankind appears doomed – with only the Watchmen, a long-disbanded troupe of masked crime-fighters-cum-superheroes, offering a glimmer of potential salvation.
Watchmen deals with the very grandest of themes, combining the intimately personal/psychological and the national and global social/political – within a satirical deconstruction of the entire superhero genre that's especially timely with the likes of The Dark Knight and Iron Man dominating the planet's multiplexes during 2008.
But while Snyder and company achieve sequences of trippy and/or loopy grandeur – most of them involving the movie's most bizarre and eyecatching denizen, the quantum, hemi-demi-semi-divine being known as Dr Manhattan (played by a somewhat becalmed Billy Crudup with the "help" of motion-capture technology) – they founder on the more basic aspects of storytelling, pacing and tone.
Snyder's characteristic, carnographic predilection for upping the "gore quotient" is especially unfortunate, resulting in numerous instances of genuinely gratuitous violence. At such junctures, he comes across like some malevolent, precocious adolescent, gloating over and revelling in cinema's capacity for extravagantly blood-thirsty mayhem, seeming neither to notice or care that this overwhelms Watchmen's more serious subtexts and quieter nuances (there's all sorts of religious imagery and references which go absolutely nowhere, for example.)
A more profitable angle might have been to emphasise the material's more comic possibilities – some of the most effective developments are those played for unexpectedly flippant laughs, such as a sex scene involving Dr Manhattan's multiple "bodies" that niftily updates a similarly 'non-corporeal' gag from Annie Hall (by "Mr" Manhattan, Woody Allen.)
It's the kind of subversive, risky, imaginative approach one can imagine, say, Paul Verhoeven pulling off – but in Snyder's hands, the results are too often weighed down by po-faced pomposity, thudding banality (including several over-appropriate soundtrack choices) and/or an excessive reverence for the original graphic-novel. The latter leads Snyder and his collaborators to gloss over many key details of the Watchmen's skills and background, mistakenly presuming audience foreknowledge and repeatedly resorting to confusing, exposition-loaded montage.
While the cast is often saddled with some cringe-worthy dialogue – "What happened to the American dream?!" moans conscience-troubled vigilante Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson, solid) – and characters who largely seem to belong to different movies from each other, the performers' energetic efforts do contribute towards keeping proceedings watchable over the course of an excessively lengthy running-time.
First among equals is Jackie Earle Haley as the most anti-social and dissatisfied of the group, Rorschach, who narrates proceedings in gravelly voice-over and is equally compelling with or without his ink-blot "mask." One presumes, meanwhile, that Matthew Goode's turn as preeningly self-confident businessman/inventor Adrian Veidt – a.k.a. Ozymandias – is intended as a private in-joke, as he's much more reminiscent of Jeremy Irons here than he ever was when stepping into Irons' own shoes for the recent Brideshead Revisited movie. If so, it's a rare example of deft subtlety in an enterprise that blusters and lumbers along with a brutal charmlessness that's undeniably attention-grabbing, but ultimately becomes distinctly tiresome.
Neil Young, 15th March, 2009
seen : 11th March, 2009 MVP : Jackie Earle Haley DVD extra 
director : Zack Snyder
country : USA
year : 2009
run-time : 158m (BBFC)
cinema : The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle
format : digital
paid : £5.75
respected second opinion : Kyle C, Movie Balloons
Tales of the Black Freighter
**** / 5 (or 10/28) : USA 2009
directed by James DePurgatorio and Mike Smith : 28mins
Who knew there was a missing link between Watchmen and Lars Von Trier's Dogville? Here it is, in the form of this cheerfully gruesome little animation, available as an extra on the feature-film DVD or as a stand-alone disc (with various additional extras therein.) Like Von Trier's film, Black Freighter is loosely based on the song 'Pirate Jenny' from Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, and was originally a metafictional element of the graphic-novel Watchmen world – in that it was a comic which characters within the comic themselves occasionally read, and whose story intersected with (and obliquely commented upon) the main narrative.
Turning Watchmen from graphic novel to film made it somewhat tricky to pull off a similar post-modern/metafictional trick with Black Freighter, and its status as a DVD extra isn't anywhere near as inventive or clever as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' original interpolations. Taken on its own terms, however, this is a more satisfying and coherent enterprise than Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie, following The Sea Captain (voiced by Gerard Butler) after an encounter with the demonic crew of The Black Freighter.
Shipwrecked and marooned, he improvises a startlingly stomach-churning method of escaping his desert island and heads back home to Davidstown, which he surmises is the Black Freighter's next destination. He makes it back in one piece – physically, at least. Mentally it's a different matter altogether, leading to the satisfyingly macabre denouement. A bloodthirsty exercise in paranoia and unreliable narration, Black Freighter is much closer to 1970s horror comics than the sci-fi world of Watchmen, and indeed if rendered via live-action and CGI as a "conventional" movie would be suitable only for the most hardened of gorehounds.
In "cartoon" form, however, it's an enjoyably unpleasant addition to the centuries-old tradition of nautical-themed tall tales, the kind of spine-chiller one can easily imagine John Houseman's Mr Machen – from John Carpenter's The Fog - relating to wide-eyed kids around the campfire, and not just because the denizens of the Freighter themselves are so clearly inspired by the red-eyed, seafaring ghouls from the 1980 classic of brackish nastiness.
19.12.09
country : USA
year : 2009
run-time : 158m (BBFC)
seen : 11th March, 2009
cinema : The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle
format : digital
paid : £5.75
MVP : Jackie Earle Haley
respected second opinion : Kyle C, Movie Balloons
DVD extra
Tales of the Black Freighter
**** / 5 (or 10/28) : USA 2009
directed by James DePurgatorio and Mike Smith : 28mins
Who knew there was a missing link between Watchmen and Lars Von Trier's Dogville? Here it is, in the form of this cheerfully gruesome little animation, available as an extra on the feature-film DVD or as a stand-alone disc (with various additional extras therein.) Like Von Trier's film, Black Freighter is loosely based on the song 'Pirate Jenny' from Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, and was originally a metafictional element of the graphic-novel Watchmen world – in that it was a comic which characters within the comic themselves occasionally read, and whose story intersected with (and obliquely commented upon) the main narrative.
Turning Watchmen from graphic novel to film made it somewhat tricky to pull off a similar post-modern/metafictional trick with Black Freighter, and its status as a DVD extra isn't anywhere near as inventive or clever as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' original interpolations. Taken on its own terms, however, this is a more satisfying and coherent enterprise than Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie, following The Sea Captain (voiced by Gerard Butler) after an encounter with the demonic crew of The Black Freighter.
Shipwrecked and marooned, he improvises a startlingly stomach-churning method of escaping his desert island and heads back home to Davidstown, which he surmises is the Black Freighter's next destination. He makes it back in one piece – physically, at least. Mentally it's a different matter altogether, leading to the satisfyingly macabre denouement. A bloodthirsty exercise in paranoia and unreliable narration, Black Freighter is much closer to 1970s horror comics than the sci-fi world of Watchmen, and indeed if rendered via live-action and CGI as a "conventional" movie would be suitable only for the most hardened of gorehounds.
In "cartoon" form, however, it's an enjoyably unpleasant addition to the centuries-old tradition of nautical-themed tall tales, the kind of spine-chiller one can easily imagine John Houseman's Mr Machen – from John Carpenter's The Fog - relating to wide-eyed kids around the campfire, and not just because the denizens of the Freighter themselves are so clearly inspired by the red-eyed, seafaring ghouls from the 1980 classic of brackish nastiness.
19.12.09
During the recent upgrade of the Film Lounge the punctuation in some reviews written between 2002 and 2004 was corrupted.
We are currently in the process of identifying the errors and amending the reviews in question. We appreciate your patience and if you do spot any problems please let us know by emailing errata@jigsawlounge.co.uk and including the offending URL.
Thank you.