REVIEW: 'Watchmen' unwatchable.

NOTE: This review is not for general audiences. It was written specifically towards people who have read "Watchmen," the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. That means there are a few spoilers for those unfamiliar with the book.

In the film, Amelie, there's a scene wherein a young boy wins a gigantic collection of marbles at the very end of recess. The boy excitedly starts jamming the marbles into his pockets, scrambling to get as many as he can until his pockets burst and... no more marbles.

Well, director Zack Snyder is that young boy, the chance to direct a movie based on the graphic novel "Watchmen" is the cache of marbles, and in trying to take everything from the Alan Moore's book sans "The Black Freighter" and the giant squid monster and put it into the film, Snyder essentially keeps nothing.

Snyder's adaptation of "Watchmen" kills itself through a series of winks and nods. The book is too expansive to include every plot point or character, so instead of trying to do so - or better yet, dropping many of these things altogether in the service of making a good movie adaptation - Snyder includes a series of references. Tons of them. The only problem with these references is that within the scope of the film, they don't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything to conclude the film within the offices of The New Frontiersman - Rorschach's favorite right-wing newsrag in the comics - if you didn't bother telling the viewers what The New Frontiersman is in the first place. It doesn't mean anything to show the kid and the newsstand owner embrace in the face of doom if you never introduced who they are as characters. And it seriously doesn't mean anything to take the best line of dialogue from the book, which was recently referenced in the brilliant Pulitzer-winning novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," and have it recited by a another character in a wholly different context that strips the line of its impact.

To be fair, not all of the movie was a complete and total train-wreck. The opening scene and credits sequence were very good. We see Blake get murdered in all its cruelty, followed up by an inventive slow-motion montage of recreated comic panels that summarizes all of the events leading up to the point where the movie begins. Great idea, because to explore these events in a traditional narrative would have added another hour to a 161-minute movie. And while his soundtrack choices leading up to this point are indicative of a man who has never listened to a song that wasn't in another movie, I liked the way Snyder handled Dr. Manhattan's origin. Of course, by handled, what I mean is that Snyder took the brilliant way Moore along with artist Dave Gibbons did it in the book and made sure it got filmed as such.

Then the movie jumps the shark. No wait, scratch that. Because this is a comic book movie, it can't jump the shark - it sprays the shark.



Oddly enough, the shark-spraying happens in a location very similar to the one from the scene I am referencing above. Silk Spectre and the sexually impotent Night Owl are aboard the Owlship after having rescued a group of people from a burning apartment building, and just as they do in the book, they start to get it on. This sex scene is probably the worst one in recent film history. It's so bad, it makes me wonder if any of the people involved in the shooting of it - be it the director, the cinematographer, the lighting techs, the key grips, or even actors Patrick Wilson and Malin Akerman - have ever had sex before in real life. The scene couldn't have been any worse in its execution if Night Owl whipped out a Batman Express card a la Batman and Robin. Then to add insult to injury, this visual train-wreck is synched to Leonard Cohen's wonderful song "Hallelujah" (as if we never heard that one in a movie before). Did Snyder bother looking at the dailies when he shot this thing? Did editor William Hoy show him a rough cut of this moment while cobbling the film together? Believe me when I say I would have more respect for the guy if the answer was 'no.'

Everything from this point on is downhill. The movie adds buckets of grisly violence where it wasn't needed. It wholly botches the wonderful moment in the book when Rorschach escapes from prison -- a senseless tragedy since it was so wonderfully storyboarded in the book. Then as a final act of cruelty in this hapless adaptation, Snyder's film takes the brilliant last act from the graphic novel and ruins it entirely. To be clear, I am not one of those people who needed the giant squid to appear in the film. Changing the method Ozymandias uses to manufacture a global catastrophe was not the problem. The problem was changing the characters' reactions to this moment, especially Night Owl's.

I can almost hear the studio money men's reaction when they read the conclusion from the book: "So let's get this straight, this Ozymandias character ended millions of human lives and the only person who tried to do anything about it was the crazy guy who got evaporated?"

What's so great about the book is that while it was a horrible thing for Ozymandias to murder millions of people, the reason no one but Rorschach gets too upset about it is because Ozymandias' actions probably saved billions of lives from an impending nuclear holocaust. In being the world's greatest villain, he was also probably its greatest hero. But instead of realizing this thematic brilliance on the big screen, which is also one of the reasons people care so much about Moore's "Watchmen" in the first place, the movie crudely shifts Night Owl into a vessel to grab Ozymandias by the scruff as if he were a dog so they could stick the character's nose into his own poop. That way the filmmakers can say "Bad Ozymandias! No! Bad! Bad!"

As I drove the 80 miles it took to get to the Charlotte screening of Watchmen, it was not my intention to see a film that took every moment, character, or detail from the book and convert it shot-for-shot into film like Sin City or 300. Nor was it really my intention to see a great film. What I was really looking for was a movie someone could show to Moore - who famously called his book unfilmable and refused to have anything to do with this movie - and say, "See, that wasn't so bad, was it? Guess that means your beloved book wasn't so 'unfilmable' after all, right?"

That's what I was looking for, but now that I have seen the film, all I can say is that Moore was right all along.