Word: comicalities
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...this, set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," is revealed in an opening-credits salvo that's among the zippiest, most thrilling assemblages in modern movies. The rest of Watchmen--which Zack Snyder, of 300 fame, directed from the wildly admired comic-book serial written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons--can't match this Mach 2 ride through alternative history. Nor is the movie likely to live up to the hype it and its source novel have generated. Derisive laughter was heard at a critics' screening, and a Hollywood Reporter review predicted that...
...would have the gigantic steel cojones to make a movie of Watchmen? Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgins, the serialized comic book came out in 1986. This was the pre-Internet age - Moore pounded out his scripts on a manual typewriter - when most comics had an afterlife only in the back-issue bins. Yet Watchmen quickly achieved status as the Grail, the Bible, the Citizen Bob Kane of its medium. (TIME canonized it as one of the 100 best novels since 1923.) And it continues to expand its reach. Last fall Gibbons...
...From the start of the Watchmen cult, film people knew two things about the comic book: (1) that it simply had to be made into a movie and (2) that it couldn't. An epic superhero saga, spanning 45 years, with six major characters who all sport double identities and crucial, intertwined back-stories, does not lend itself to the narrative turbo-thrust of a standard action film. Indeed, the superest hero of the bunch - Dr. Manhattan, once known as Jon Osterman - is not an action hero; he's a passive one, a contemplative godhead, a sinewy blue nude Buddha...
...story's kernel of genius, which Moore kept popping over 12 monthly installments, is that actions have consequences, even in Action Comics. (That early comic book, which in 1938 contained the first adventure of Superman, was published by D.C., which 46 years later ran Watchmen.) The world of fantasy alters the "real" world it parallels. When superheroes do stuff, it changes the history of the America we've lived through. Moore's alternate history went like this...
...performances in David Lynch's Dune. It's just, mostly, inert. (The two self-starters are Haley, who does right by his grizzled role, and Morgan, a Robert Downey Jr. knockoff, who chews the scenery and his stogie with equal aplomb.) And while the climax is unusual in a comic-book movie - bad guy does very bad thing, then escapes his comeuppance by persuading folks that what he's done is really kind of a good thing - it lacks the kick of apocalyptic retribution the mass audience expects and deserves...