Watchmen amiss.

WATCHMEN, the movie based on the cult classic graphic novel of the same name, hit theaters today, and the reviews are out. In Variety, Justin Chang calls it, "a meditation on the nature and value of heroism in uncertain times..." Yikes. What does that even mean? The uncertain times Chang refers to appear in WATCHMEN as a nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, circa the mid-1980s.

As usual with science-fiction movies, Roger Ebert remains neutral. He thinks it makes comic books seem quite adult and sophisticated, and he plans to see the picture again in IMAX. Kenneth Turan's review is one of the most interesting and spot-on. An excerpt: "(director Zack) Snyder has been unable to create a satisfying tone for the proceedings. While the graphic novel played everything as realistically as it could, the film feels artificially stylized and inappropriately cartoonish. That, in turn, undercuts the film's key point that these superheroes have very human flaws and limitations."

I saw it at 12:01 this morning. Leaving the theater three hours later, the audience gave a long and thorough ovation. I didn't join in with them. Having read the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel earlier in the year, I was amongst those thrilled by the previews for the picture; most especially at how many images in the previews matched images in the comic with eerie tenacity. The movie packs panels in as if this was its sole mission, and the story, which made basic sense in the comic, seemed almost incoherent in the film adaptation. More to the point, it seemed purposeless. One could argue the same case for the comic book, as Anthony Lane does in the New Yorker. True. The graphic novel, while intensely wrought with layers of detail, is passed its "sell-by" date, and director Snyder doesn't seem to care. He has rooted the movie in a strange alternate future in which it is the mid-80s again, Nixon is still president, and America has won the Vietnam war, thanks to a blue demon with an unnerving phallus called Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan strides across screen, member swinging (a somewhat different interpretation than that in the comic book, where Manhattan seemed to have no genitalia), extending his arm towards Vietcong soldiers and vaporizing them in an explosion of blood. Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" thundered on the soundtrack. The audience laughed. And I started wondering how many people in the audience had any real sense of the history behind Vietnam. Did this seen legit to them? It seemed as if Snyder wasn't trying to recreate Vietnam, as much as he was trying to recreate APOCALYPSE NOW.

I have seen Zack Snyder's remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, and I have seen his other comic book adaptation, Frank Miller's 300. DAWN OF THE DEAD impressed me as interesting, tense and fun-a worthwhile expansion of the original film. 300 was pretty terrible, with only Gerard Butler distinguishing himself amidst the fake plastic abdominals and slow-motion football take-downs. 300, like WATCHMEN, seems indifferent to tone or feel, and Snyder seems willing to disregard poor performances in favor of slavish visual replication of comic book panels.

If that didn't seem the emphasis in DAWN OF THE DEAD, it was perhaps because that film was filled with talented performers like Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phipher, who had many a time to contend with standing out in a bad movie. All those performers ganged up together and made the degree of acting brought to bear in DAWN OF THE DEAD a cut above average. I think Snyder had very little to do with it. 300 was peppered with performances ranging from bizarre to flat bad, as witness a lost David Wenham and the sheer insanity of the way the film treats Darius. What WATCHMEN suffers from more than anything is some of the lousiest performances in a recent feature film. Between this and miscasting, it seems as if the director doesn't know a stellar performances from a flaccid carp. To pick one example, Jeffrey Dean Morgan looks just like the Comedian character in the graphic novel, but he has none of the resolve of the Comedian in the story. A genuine anarchist, the Comedian is shown executing a woman who was carrying his child, lighting fleeing Vietcong soldiers on fire with a grin, and raping his fellow "Minuteman" Sally Jupiter. The Comedian of the comic only cracks when he learns of the villain's insidious plan for world peace-the prospect is so far beyond his simple need for mayhem in life that he just cracks-but rather than playing the role as a cold-hearted, self-aware sadist, Morgan tries to see him as a likeable, sympathetic guy. The Comedian of the movie is filled with self-doubt, something which in the graphic novel clearly enters his psyche only when he discovers that the world of militant chaos he has lived in and loved for so many years is about to go up in smoke. Morgan looks ready to bear a wounded soul to his illegitimate daughter and even to milquetoast superhero Nite Owl.

Speaking of Nite Owl, here's some of the worst casting of the picture. Patrick Wilson seems committed to channeling Christopher Reeves Clark Kent in this part. As we understand it in the story, Nite Owl is a former superhero who hung up his cloak when the Keene act outlawed costumed vigilantes. He sits around eating well and getting very complacent. When he finally dons his superhero costume again, in an effort to dispatch his fear of nuclear armageddon and regain his virility, he has trouble fitting the waistline. Early on they appear to be trying to stuff Patrick Wilson's gut and make him look dowdy. Then Wilson takes off all his clothes for an abortive sex scene, and we see not some pudgy, middle-aged guy who writes articles for ornithology magazines, but rather a guy built like a rugby player. Wilson is ripped-but this is obvious even when they have stuffed his gut-his face remains lean and his eyes hungry and perceptive. Sure, Wilson looks a lot like Nite Owl in the face, but every move he makes to appear this character comes across as a put-on; cleverly thought-out, but not really felt.

Sally Jupiter, the former Silk Spectre, is the worst bit of this whole squalid affair, and final proof of Snyder's indifference to performance. Carla Gugino plays the young Jupiter in the flashback scenes, and she is statuesque and pretty appropriate for the role. The problem is that most of her screen-time is devoted to the older incarnation of Jupiter as the mother of the current Silk Spectre. So, as is the grotesque custom in current Hollywood, rather than hire a capable elderly actress, they simply cover the young Gugino in prosthetic wrinkles that fail to hide a full, round-cheeked, young face. Then Ms. Gugino ambles around conveying her impression of an elderly woman. It's a little like watching Blanche DuBois in a state-college production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." The performance, so central to what meaning remains in the graphic novel, is intolerably bad in the film, and it simply calls attention to the millions of dollars poured into other aspects of the production while the performances wallow langorously, always refusing to gel into more than their disparate, nearly incoherent parts.

That's the main problem with the WATCHMEN movie, in a nutshell; while millions of dollars went into creating perfect comic-book panels on film, no one was minding the store on the performance front. The drama present in the dense plot of WATCHMEN, largely preserved by Snyder and company, fails to coalesce because nobody is acting on the same wavelength. Often they don't even appear to be in the same room together. And so no tone ever comes together, and none of the more emotional beats of the story register properly.

Of course, it's a popular phenomenon, well-promoted by the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world (would Time Magazine put it on their list of the century's most important books if Time Warner didn't have to promote the movie like crazy?), and it will probably gross tons of money and follow the same route to ersatz glory as 300 did. Every week I meet another person who loved 300, and my spirits sink. Is this what it's come down to? Has the subtle sway of drama been completely excised from popular filmmaking for the general population? Does it matter that we identify the emotions and motivation behind a character's actions? Is action enough? The fights in WATCHMEN throw down as hard as in a Jet Li movie cross-polinated with FRIDAY THE 13th. Maybe that's enough for some folks, but, well, yikes.