Title - Watchmen (2009) ~ Director's Cut

Director - Zack Snyder

Country - United States

I gained access to the director's cut of Watchmen a little early last week so despite being buried under tons of work I managed to give it a proper screening once and then watched parts of it on and off throughout the remainder of the week and over the weekend. Although I was not entirely pleased with the Watchmen movie when I watched in the theatres some months ago, I still found enough aspects of it compelling enough to warrant a rewatch with the excised material restored just to see if it would change my opinion of the film overall. Short answer: No of course not.

A few of the added scenes do make for some smoother transitions in a couple of places but one that should never have been left out in the first place is a great addition while a couple of others are fairly unnecessary or just plain embarassing in the case of the added Nixon/Kissinger footage. There's a bit more Rorschach out of mask and really, and I mean REALLY in your face to the point of distraction so I can definitely see why those were cut.

The scene that should not have been left out was a very effective and touching death scene involving the original Nite Owl Hollis Mason. His brutal beatdown transitions quite nicely and very emotionally effective to Daniel's hearing it on the news while he and Rorschach are questioning the bar thugs and really amplifies the emotions in his character as he targets a local Knot Top gang member and almost beats him to death while Rorschach ironically saves him by pulling Daniel away. Good stuff to see now but it's not a particularly long piece and it shouldn't have been cut.

But after all is said and done at its core I still am left with the Watchmen movie that Zack Snyder hath wrought. Despite my rather negative tone I am actually somewhat on the fence as far as the movie goes. There are some aspects that I did enjoy but then there's those nagging negatives and since I suppose I never did give Watchmen a proper review when I orginally watched it now is as good a time as any to go over some of those points.

I did appreciate some of the attention to detail concerning the attempt to make a period '80s film. Despite the very out of place and somewhat cartoonish political figures and TV personalities there were some more subtle attempts being made in the decoration of some of the homes of some of the heroes and characters such as the Nagel paintings in The Comedian's bedroom and the perfume commercial. But unfortunatly these are drowned out by obvious head beating red flags for those not paying attention and thus the original MTV station ID's and some random an rather inappropriate music inclusion. Oh did I mention the music?

I'm pretty sure this film makes some of the worst attempts at matching music to film that I've ever seen in a major film production. Other than a little incidental music courtesy of Phillip Glass, The Comedian's "unforgettable" and the opening working fairly well, everything else just seems inserted in the most clumsy and obvious way possible. It really took me out of the film in an incredibly violent way and I really started to have the feeling that this was done by a couple of film student's first attempt at marrying music to their film. One seemed to have a reasonable grasp on how things work, and the other just grabbed some music that they thought sounded cool 'cause he heard them in other films or their content was '80 or war oriented and never thought of how they would sound over the action.

An aspect that I did rather enjoy was the action. I'm very much a martial arts film fan and I so I'm pretty critical of fisticuffs being presented in film these days and how a film with a high level of production has no excuses these days for sloppiness or poorly staged conflicts. Damon Caro was the fight choreographer on this film and I believe he did quite a bang-up job. The fighting techniques of the various heroes are unique to their character and seem very natural and well thought out. Adrian Veidt's in particular are a thing of beauty to watch. As per his character as the "perfect man" his hits are perfect strokes of counter-hits and created openings in the defense of other's. Sure, there were a few openings a tad too large there during the end conflict but nothing egregious to the point that I just feel like I'm being overly nit-picking.

But this would all be for naught if the director couldn't properly block the scene and in this case I feel that Snyder did an excellent job in incorporating the visceral nature of the choreography with the sound and angles required to make them exciting. Unfortunately Snyder's heavy reliance on all thing digital do muck up a few moments as bones are broken and limbs are bent and copious amounts of very shiny CG blood slowly fly away from the wounds which is completely unncessary and also very silly to watch. I expect to see poorly rendered CG blood in crappy little made for TV horror films, not large budget efforts.

But that brings me to my biggest problem with the film -- the overall look. There seems to be an all encompassing sheen to the entire movie. Despite attempts to ground the film in gritty city locations and simple barren wastelands, the colour palettes of the obvious digital colour editing seem too extreme and as a result everything seems completely unreal. This is fine if you are attempting to make an unreal world, but this is supposed to be set in the real world and everywhere you look the color is too intense and the focus is too sharp. Even the details fail when the original Nite Owl's "old" war era news clippings look as new as the day they were published. Actually they look newer as the paper looks to be higher quality than they were orginally using.

Then there's the dynamic nature of the film. Despite my love for the action it goes completely against the aspirations of the material. The story is supposed to deconstruct the hero myth not build upon them. Yet time and time again the cool fight scenes come up and, entertaining though they are, they ruin the point that is trying to be made by its very execution. The Comedian's attempted rape is too dynamic and made to look almost interesting instead of simple and brutal. His character's revelation of Hooded Justice's thrill of violence is further downplayed as the reaction and sound are muted as if Snyder really had no idea what the dialogue meant.

Despite their self-denial, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II are all but useless unless they are acting out "in costume". They are broken people that were raised as heroes and never allowed to develop as individuals. The film attempts to touch upon this but it is never expressed properly and the poorly handled sex scene completely misses the point. Even Rorschach is built a bit too much up as a righteous anti-hero when in reality he is just a rabid dog that society has created and released upon itself. Snyder tries to touch upon the concept of broken heroes as he clearly tried to follow the script, but unfortunately he can't resist trying to make the characters as cool and interesting as possible despite the fact that clearly they weren't supposed to be.

As I dwell upon Snyder's missteps though I think I understand why Alan Moore and others over the years always concluded that Watchmen was unfilmable. Because to commit the story to film it's practically impossible not to force dynamic properties upon the film and that is something that clearly goes against the point of the book. The pace and the construction of the book almost demand a certain amount of inertia being brought to the superhero concept. It presents the heroes and demonstrates how if they existed in real life how broken they would become no matter what their abilities were. It's an unnatural condition and a unnatural life and to attempt to make a film about heroes then forces you to make them look...heroic. Which is something they clearly are not.