Brace yourself: Watchmen is actually good.

            Hey, I’m as surprised as you are. Probably more so.

            Who would ever have imagined that all those endless pages of overwrought dialogue, pretentious sermonizing, and turgid faux-action would translate into screen gold?

            Certainly not I.

            Truth is, it took me twenty years to finish that celebrated graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. I bought it back in 1988, started it 1989, and wrapped it up a week or so before this picture premiered in 2009. Every three or four years I would rediscover it—under a chair, beneath a pile of newspapers, wedged between boots in the closet—read a few pages. But soon enough either the bloated self-importance would frustrate me, or the going-nowhere-fastness would make me drowsy, and I would toss it aside.

            It was not until I knew I would be reviewing the movie that I found the courage to soldier on to the end.

            Much has already been said about the changes screen writers David Hayter and Alex Tse made to the plot— specifically in respect to the ending, and to a revered story-within-a-story pirate tale that runs in symbolic parallel to the main narrative continuum.

            Fear not. The re-imagined ending of the film is far superior to the one in the graphic novel. It actually makes better sense, and is a good deal more linear. Yes, yes—it is not as arcane, perhaps not so wicked. But, let’s face it, the giant monster with freight train-sized tentacles was ridiculous from the get-go. Nixing it was inspired. The Tales of the Black Freighter (the aforesaid piratical sub-story) was a major distraction in the novel, interrupting the flow almost as egregiously as the ponderous printed word inserts, and would have been incomprehensible on-screen. It basically had to be deep-sixed..

            But enough with the graphic novel comparisons.

            Let’s talk about the flick itself.

            The question you want me to answer is obvious: How come it works?

            One word, friends: Casting.

            The heart and soul of the film is Rorschach, a tormented sociopath obsessed with meting out his own merciless form of street justice, a splotch-masked vigilante hated in equal measure by the cops, the bad guys, and the general public—in short, by everyone. Former child star Jackie Earl Haley captures the very essence of the character, and in the process delivers what may be the most astounding performance of the year. His scratchy, world-weary monologue is captivating. His physicality, vulnerability, and bone-crunching cruelty define the film in a way that the larger, glitzier plot does not. Indeed, cannot.

            Of almost equal importance are Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), formerly known as Nite Owl, a washed-up superhero secretly yearning for a revival of the good old days, and Laurie Jupiter (Scandinavian bombshell Malin Akerman), another retired masked crime fighter who is unhappily involved with the not-quite-human-anymore Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).  The slow, gentle love that blossoms between Dreiberg and Jupiter provides the romance that must necessarily inhabit the core of any successful comic book (oops, make that graphic novel) film. It is well done, and supplies a feel-good backdrop to the harrowing events that dominate the film’s central story. Wilson’s wistful, paunchy but still heroic Dreiberg shines; an anchoring element to the film.

            Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the Comedian, another former superhero; a bloodthirsty, amoral brute whose bitter cynicism shatters in the face of the story’s ultimate, awful truth. Morgan’s Comedian looks like Robert Downey, Jr., after another twenty years of hard drinking, womanizing, and indiscriminate steroid use. Craggy. Pock-marked. Wasted but still formidable. What had been rakishness has now become pasty dissipation. What had been gruff charm has turned into raw savagery.

            Crudup is suitably remote and philosophical as the godlike Manhattan, a scientist who has been accidentally and irreversibly transformed into an indestructible, ageless superbeing; a spectral creature that is rapidly losing its affinity for and understanding of humanity. Matthew Goode rounds things out as the effete masked hero turned ruthless global entrepreneur Adrian Veidt, formerly known as Ozymandias—reputed to be the smartest man on the planet.

            The story, ripped from the once timely Cold War headlines of the mid-eighties, should by all rights collapse under its own dead weight. But it doesn’t. This may be partly due to the renewed interest in the era generated by the release of Frost/Nixon. Tricky Dick is the president in Watchmen, and, in a nice touch, is on his fourth term. The film has some fun with a few other famous political and corporate names from the time period—Henry Kissinger and Lee Iacocca, inter alia.

            But I think the real reason the story resonates is that our relations with Putin’s Russia have chilled decidedly in the past few years. It is suddenly all too easy to see the two countries reverting to a tense Cold War standoff, especially with rumors afoot of Russian bombers being stationed in Cuba and Venezuela.

            So, rather than being stale, the underlying political themes almost sizzle.

            Here is the story in a nutshell. It is 1985. Superheroes have been outlawed—by the Keene Act. Most of the men and women who had worn capes and spandex have quietly retreated into normal lives. Their identities, except for Veidt’s and Manhattan’s, have never been revealed.

            The nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union continues unabated, despite the fact that the U.S. has the massively, though not supremely, powerful Dr. Manhattan on its side. His presence is sufficient to prevent war but not enough to compel worldwide peace. We learn that in the event of a missile launch by the USSR, he could only stop 99 percent or so of the warheads from reaching their targets. The remaining 1 percent would be more than enough to scorch the planet and end life as we know it. Thus, things really haven’t changed all that much.

            In the film’s opening, the Comedian is murdered; heaved through the plate glass windows of his sky rise condo in New York City. Rorschach, the only costumer who has refused to quit, decides to find out why. He enlists an at first reluctant Dreiberg and—later—an outright distrustful Jupiter in that investigation.

            Shortly thereafter, Dr. Manhattan disappears. This triggers a global crisis. The uneven but stable balance of power is broken. A war in perennial flashpoint Afghanistan suddenly seems unavoidable. The world hovers on the brink of atomic holocaust.

            Rorschach and his companions slowly begin to realize there may be a connection between these events.

            Watch the film to find out the rest.

            The effects are top-notch, especially the spectacular business on Mars. The directing, by 300's Zack Snyder, is crisp and polished. And the closing gimmick is, in its own way, clever.

            But the reason the movie succeeds has nothing to do with CGI wizardry or the supposedly shocking finale. No, it is the characters who have been so memorably brought to life, and who have been given such real depth. It is the acting. Plain and simple. The actors have taken the mediocre dialogue—lifted almost verbatim from the novel—and invested it with meaning and emotion.

            Because of them, Watchmen triumphs.

Warner Bros.
U.S. Release Date: March 6, 2009
Director: Zack Snyder
Screen writer: David Hayter and Alex Tse (from the graphic novel of the same name written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons)
Running Time: 163 minutes