Word: watchmen
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There is the America whose history you've lived through, and then there is the America guarded by the Watchmen, founded in 1940 as the Minutemen. In this parallel nation, in the Times Square revelry on V-J day, a nurse was kissed by the slinky superheroine Silhouette. J.F.K. greeted Dr. Manhattan, the preternatural, irradiated blue man, at the White House and was gunned down by the splenetic, cigar-chomping Comedian. A U.S. astronaut walked on the moon and found Dr. M. waiting for him. In 1971, President Richard Nixon sent Manhattan and the Comedian to Vietnam...
...opening, and for sure it doesn't. Snyder spends much of the movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance. He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies...
...other films made from his stuff (From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Constantine, V for Vendetta), Moore has declined screen credit on the Watchmen movie. But whatever his thoughts on the corruptive properties of cinema, he could have found no more devoted Watch-man than Snyder. The ultimate fetishist-auteur, he takes hallowed pulp artifacts - the '70s horror movie Dawn of the Dead, the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 and now this - and films them with the near-fanatic fidelity of someone constructing an Eiffel Tower replica out of matchsticks...
...Watchmen he brings a reverence for the text that equals Mel Gibson's in The Passion of the Christ and comes close to Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of the Hitchcock Psycho. He uses Gibbons' panels as virtual storyboards for his scenes, and quotes Moore's ripe dialogue verbatim. (From Rorschach's journal: "Beneath me, this awful city. It screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.... The dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences...
...Maybe Watchmen is one of those cult films that doesn't expand beyond the true believers. It probably won't make even alternative movie history. It certainly contains its share of popcorn breaks: hit the concession stand whenever Dan and Laurie start their mooning. But it bravely pursues its agenda with a monomaniacal grandeur, on the order of Speed Racer and Synecdoche, New York. (Loyal readers will understand that I mean this as a compliment.) Both admirable for and cramped by its fidelity to the Moore vision, this ambitious picture is a thing of bits and pieces. Yes, the bits...