Zack Snyder Turned Watchmen Into a Shot-for-Shot Copy, and It Still Doesn’t Work

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen opens on a murder and spends the next 163 minutes explaining why it does not matter. That is the central problem with the 2009 film, and no amount of fidelity to its source can hide it.

Trailer, via Legendary.

Edward Blake Goes Through a Window

The film is set in an alternate 1985, at the height of the Cold War. Richard Nixon is a five-term president. Costumed crime-fighters rose from 1939 to 1977, then met public backlash and an anti-vigilante act that closed them down. A man in a Manhattan apartment watches news about escalating tensions, and then an unknown assailant attacks him and hurls him to the street below.

The dead man is Edward Blake, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He was the Comedian, a costumed hero who worked for the government. Rorschach, a vigilante detective who operates illegally, finds out who the body belongs to and starts warning the old team.

Rorschach Warns the Watchmen

Jackie Earle Haley plays Rorschach, and he is the best thing in Watchmen. He suspects other vigilantes could be attacked. Dan Dreiberg, his former partner, thinks he is paranoid. Adrian Veidt, a crime-fighter turned businessman, dismisses the concerns too. Doctor Manhattan, a physicist whose accidental superpowers make him a national security asset, is preoccupied with energy research and ignores him outright.

So the investigation stalls, and the film drifts. Snyder has a cast that can carry this — Patrick Wilson as Dreiberg, Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter, Billy Crudup as Manhattan, Matthew Goode as Veidt, Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter. He gives them a plot that keeps sliding away from them.

The Funeral Is the Best Scene

At Blake’s funeral, Manhattan, Veidt and Dreiberg each recall the Comedian’s pessimism in his later years about the Watchmen’s mission. It is the one stretch where the film slows down and lets its characters be people instead of symbols.

After the service, a lone mourner pays his respects. Rorschach tracks him down and questions him. The mourner is Edgar Jacobi, a former supervillain called Moloch the Mystic, played by Matt Frewer.

Jacobi says Blake had recently broken into his apartment while he was sleeping — tearful, unmasked, and incoherent. Rorschach is astonished. He doubts Jacobi would tell a lie so bizarre.

That is the hook the whole film should have been built on: the hardest man in the story hearing that the worst man in the story fell apart at the end. Watchmen notices it and moves on.

Doctor Manhattan Exiles Himself

During a press interview, an investigative journalist tells Doctor Manhattan that several people who had contact with him developed cancer, including his former girlfriend. Other reporters mob him with questions. He snaps and exiles himself.

This is the film’s second big turn, and it lands harder than the first. Crudup plays Manhattan as a man already gone, and the cancer revelation gives him a reason to leave that has nothing to do with heroism. The reunited heroes then set out to prevent their own destruction. In doing so they uncover a sinister plot that puts all of humanity in grave danger.

The problem is that “all of humanity in grave danger” is a low ceiling for a film this long. Watchmen has 163 minutes and spends them on a conspiracy that the audience is asked to care about because the characters do.

Nearly Two Decades in Development Hell

The road to this film was absurd. From October 1987 until October 2005 — nearly two decades — a live-action Watchmen adaptation sat in development hell. Producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver started it at 20th Century Fox, then moved it to Warner Bros., the sister company of Watchmen publisher DC Comics.

They hired Terry Gilliam, who eventually left the production and deemed the complex comic “unfilmable.” In the 2000s, Gordon and Lloyd Levin worked with Universal Pictures, Revolution Studios and Paramount Pictures. David Hayter, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass were each attached before the project was canceled over budget disputes. In October 2005 it returned to Warner Bros., and Snyder was hired to direct. Hayter and Alex Tse wrote the screenplay.

Snyder has said he cast younger actors because of the many flashback scenes, and that it was easier to age actors with make-up than to cast two actors in one role. He said doubling historical figures would give the film a “satirical quality” and “create this ’80s vibe.” His son plays a young Rorschach. Snyder himself appears as an American soldier in Vietnam. Thomas Jane was invited but declined, citing being too busy.

That is a real production story, and it explains a lot. A film that took nearly two decades to get made arrives carrying every compromise made along the way.

What Watchmen Gets Right, and What It Does Not

The tagline is “Justice is coming to all of us. No matter what we do.” It is a good line for a film that never quite earns it.

Here is what works, ranked:

1. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach — the only performance that makes the film’s ugliness feel deliberate rather than decorative.
2. The funeral sequence — the one scene that treats the Comedian as a person instead of a plot device.
3. Billy Crudup as Doctor Manhattan — a cold, effective turn that gives the film its only real emotional exit.
4. The production design — the alternate-1985 setting is rendered with obvious care.

And here is what does not: the film is a mystery that solves itself, an action film with little action that matters, and a science fiction story whose biggest idea — that saving humanity might require something monstrous — gets buried under runtime. The genres listed for Watchmen are Mystery, Action and Science Fiction. It is only ever convincingly one of them.

Where 5.6 of 10 Comes From

Watchmen is a faithful adaptation of a comic that many people believed could not be adapted, and that faithfulness is not the same as success. Snyder got the plot, the cast and the look. He did not get the rhythm. The film moves in long, flat stretches between a handful of genuinely strong scenes, and the strong scenes are almost all conversations.

The score is 5.6 of 10, matching the published critical score. That number is right. Watchmen is not a failure of ambition — the ambition is visible in every frame. It is a failure of proportion. A 163-minute film about the end of the world should feel like it is building toward something, and this one mostly feels like it is catching up to a book that already said it better.

2009 films · DC Comics · movie review · superhero movies · Watchmen · Zack Snyder