Word: snyders
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...Complicating this is the possessiveness felt by hardcore Watchmaniacs, who believe that any change is an act of treason. When director Zack Snyder showed clips of the movie last fall to an audience of rapt but wary votaries, one portly fellow told him, "On behalf of the obese-obsessive demographic, I want your assurance that the ending does not puss out." Such is the snakebite of hype, especially for a project with such outsize expectations. The film, budgeted at $100 million and the object of a rights wrangle between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, has received less than rapturous...
...That's the dilemma the director faced: to risk disappointing both the fan base (for diverting from the sacred text) and the agnostic mass audience (for being a confusing, unsatisfying movie experience). Snyder - who had a big hit two years ago with 300, and who took Watchmen on after interesting auteurs from Terry Gilliam in the '80s to Paul Greengrass a few years ago fell out - went with the fan base. He worked from a script written in 2001 by David Hayter, and filigreed by Alex Tse, that was as close to the original as a movie could...
...Soviet Union could collapse under its own dead weight. In that sense, Watchmen is another replay of the Nixon years to which Hollywood filmmakers are addicted - Frost/Nixon, Milk, etc. - and a period piece that may not resonate with audiences who weren't alive when Tricky Dick was in power. (Snyder says he was asked if Nixon could be replaced by George W. Bush; he wisely declined.) Set in the recent past, it features characters who cannot escape their own, more remote past. (See pictures of movie costumes...
...When Snyder showed this four-minute sequence in New York last fall, Gibbons was in the audience and rose to say, cheerfully, "Didn't suck too bad." I'd go further, and say it's among the zippiest, most thrilling assemblages in modern movies, and the film's single great burst of creation and concision. Three times I've seen the credits sequence, and repeated viewings help harvest new goodies - like the few second showing Silhouette in bed, with another woman, murdered, and WHORES scrawled in blood on the walls in her bed (which is different, by the way, from...
...Maybe there's no way the rest of the film could match this 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...