Watchmen overreaches but keeps on ticking
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
LOVE IS DA BOMB: Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman, left) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson)
Upon its publication in the mid-1980s, the 12-issue graphic novel Watchmen earned a reputation for being “the Citizen Kane of comic books.” That’s not just hyperbole: Both works feature multiple narrators trying to piece together an enigmatic death, although in Watchmen, the ensemble happens to be former masked heroes, sleuthing against a backdrop of impending nuclear war.
Like Orson Welles, Watchmen writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons drew on seemingly every stylistic innovation in their respective media and shot them with lightning, raising the bar for a popular but increasingly sophisticated art form.
Zack Snyder’s long-awaited film adaptation of Watchmen is not a classic worthy of Citizen Kane. Thankfully, it’s not a bomb on a par with Howard the Duck, either. It comes close to being something like A Clockwork Orange for superhero movies — a dystopian satire marked by meticulous craftsmanship and sluggish pacing, of incongruous music and horrific violence, of heavy-handed sermonizing and astonishing imagery.
