AudioShocker

One of the best things about Culturology's credo to always be at least one week behind the times, at all times, is that I never have to worry about writing "reviews." Which isn't to say that I wouldn't mind writing reviews now and then, getting in on advanced screenings or whatever, but you know, that would have to be a separate entity to this (and given that I'm already writing these things at the last possible minute--a terrible thing to admit, I know, I'd probably be better off just doing what I'm doing). And what occasions this particular preamble? You've probably already guessed, but I went to see the Watchmen over the weekend, part of the 61%-smaller-than-last-weekend audience that hadn't gotten around to seeing it yet (I have a hard time believing that anybody went to it more than once). So what follows is a culturological discussion of said film, so will be rife with spoilers and tired commentary that you've already read in similar form elsewhere:

Gah! where to start? Okay... Watchmen had one of the worst soundtracks I've ever witnessed. Lazily, lazily done, with what must have been a mind towards "intertextuality," where, if all of the songs used were already famous from other movies, that would establish some kind of web of references to mirror the kind of inter-text play of the Watchmen book. Of course, this fails, especially as the music supervisor was also looking for great levels of incongruity along with the familiarity of the soundtrack. It's as if the only music they had to choose from was the Forrest Gump soundtrack. The most egregious fouls were using "The Times They Are A-Changin'" during the terrible opening credits sequence, a random placement of "The Sound of Silence" over the Comedian's burial, well, actually it goes on and on, but I suppose I have a particular beef of using bits of of Philip Glass's soundtrack to Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi during one of the horrendous Dr. Manhattan/Mars scenes. It's one thing to lift songs already popular from other movies (using Ride of the Valkyries in Vietnam I suppose was the most obvious "reference," though similarly annoying to all the others), but then to go so far as to snip an actual soundtrack from another movie and use that? Fucking lazy. Though I suppose there are some idiot Philip Glass fans out there (most Glass fans are idiots) that thought it was awesome to hear his music in a mainstream movie like that (forgetting that Glass already writes terrible soundtracks for other movies as well). But given that Koyaanisqwatsi is actual a brilliant cinematic artifact, the lifting of the music is cheap and shitty in Watchmen.

Which brings up my other main complaint about Watchmen (if I had to write a review it would go something like this: "I don't regret having watched it; it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but I never need to watch it again."): who the hell was the intended audience for this movie? My experience in watching the thing was that I was constantly adding information from the book back into the movie as I watched it. Which is fine, and especially easy to do given that the look of the comic really was quite well adapted into the movie. Although, despite having the "look" pretty much dead on, they lost much of the style of the Watchmen, which, as I understand it, while definitely in a somewhat pulpy style, was also quietly innovative back in the '80s. But the movie failed as a movie. It was inelegantly paced, bloatedly long, and Snyder's fight sequence style, with all of its slow-mo/fast-mo and pose-striking just seemed bizarre to me, especially in contrast to how much he tried to play up the "normal, pathetic humans" angle of the main characters when they're out of costume. So this post is rapidly devolving into a list of complaints about the movie, which I was hoping to avoid, but probably just what it deserves...

But, again, I can't imagine that any "fans" of the book were satisfied by the movie, and I can't imagine that any newbies felt like the movie made any sense or was very good. I do think that the movie demonstrated that the central plot of Watchmen is a very solid plot (insofar as that's all that's left in the movie from the book, anyway, with the "extras" stripped away), so in spite of being mismanaged by Snyder, the plot still demonstrates its quality. I also think much of the period aspect of the movie was misguided, since Soviet plots in Afghanistan simply don't have the same kind of resonance with audiences as they did 25 years ago. This kind of "faithful" movie adaptation ends up being an exercise in idiocy, since anyone with half an imagination will prefer the comic book to the live-action movie (one notable exception was seeing Rorschach shiver when he turns down a warmer coat in the Antarctic). One of the things that made Iron Man successful was that they updated his creation story, bringing an old story into modern times. Updating Watchmen may have been difficult, but really, given how much of the rest of the book was discarded anyway--the stuff that tied it closer in to comics and written-media consumption in general--made it possible to shuffle the backstory up a couple of decades as well.

Instead, we're left with a failed artifact of turning a comic book into live action, where all that history is left with is a strange kind of half-assed nonsensical "acting out" of a text. Major letdown. I truly hope that this particular trend in comic book movie-making dies a swift and painful death (hopefully the relatively poor numbers for Watchmen will catalyse this decline). The world is much better off with better made, original, non-comic book superhero movies than vacuous exercises in treating comic books as storyboards.