Confession: I kinda, sorta watched “300”. Granted, out of the corner of my eye while I did other things, and only with half-interest, but I did see enough to realize what a terrible piece of shit it is: pointlessly violent, shallow, racist, homophobic-while-homoerotic, boring, and stupid. So, I did share people’s trepidation about “Watchmen”, which means that I was ecstatic for much of the first half of the movie. Zack Snyder got it, it seemed. All the choices he made that I could tell were going to be controversial, I thought were brilliant, and did a lot to translate ideas in the book to the silver screen. The slow-mo fight sequences that made the masked avengers look like they were very nearly super-strong didn’t bother me, because it’s a shorthand way to convey that these people, as pathetic as they are, nonetheless were able to earn their reputations as crime fighters. I thought the music choices were brilliant—-the fact that they were cliches was deliberate, a way to ground this alternative U.S. history in our history. Oft-times, they were ironic, like “Sounds of Silence” playing over the Comedian’s funeral scene, a nice evocation of a counter-culture movie to put away a man who opposed the counter-culture to the point of shooting hippies. The opening sequence did a marvelous job of putting away a lot of backstory they didn’t have time to draw out during the film (including the hate crime killing of the Silhouette, and the way that everyone else just lamely accepts it). The rape scene, contextualized as it was against the other violence against women that the Comedian commits, works as well as it did in the book, which is to say really well. (Though I have to say, as painful as it is to watch it, it needed to share screen time more equally with the killing of the pregnant woman.) If you don’t have Rorschach and the Comedian doing really horrible things, then the fact that the good guys stand lamely by while they do it has less impact. The comic book-y look to it all was the smart choice. If the book “Watchmen” is about other comic books, then the movie should be about other superhero movies, which you can’t do without grounding it in the look that indicates that’s what it is.
In fact, for the first 2/3 of the movie, the faults struck me as minor, especially since it maintained a strongly ironic tone that is necessary to getting the book onscreen. There was a lot of dark laughter in the audience at parts (though probably all from people like me who’ve read the book). Except for the actresses who played mom and daughter Silk Spectre, I thought the acting was good (and was furious that they, once again, just plug women who can’t act into a movie on the theory that we in the audience will be too busy looking at their asses to notice). The guy who played Night Owl was particularly interesting, and did a good job of showing how he’s just a nerdy guy who loves the masked avenger business, because it’s his only way of feeling like a man. The guy who played Rorschach delivered an uncompromising performance, too, and didn’t seem interested in giving such a nasty, villainous character some sort of likability that would detract from the point. But most importantly, the tone of absurdity was well-maintained throughout the first 2/3. There’s a lot of stuff about the characters that Snyder could have let slide, but didn’t—-Dr. Manhattan’s casual cruelty that stems from wanting to stay attached to the world even though he’s clearly not of it any longer, Night Owl’s Nice Guy® pathos, Ozymandias’s delusions of grandeur, and Laurie’s self-centered neediness that allows her to exploit Night Owl’s crush on her.