Watchmen Review

The title sequence is the best thing Snyder has ever directed: thirty years of alternate American history compressed into a series of tableaux set to Bob Dylan, doing in six minutes what most franchises need three films to establish. Larry Fong's photography is enormously rich, the costume and production design are exact, and Jackie Earle Haley finds the real man inside Rorschach, a small, damaged, self righteous creature whose voice sounds like a wound.

Billy Crudup's blue indifference is well judged. The problem is tonal and it is fundamental. Moore wrote a book about how ugly and pathetic vigilante violence actually is; Snyder films bones snapping in loving slow motion and lets his ageing brawlers move like superheroes, so the satire keeps getting overwritten by admiration. Malin Åkerman is stranded, the Leonard Cohen needle drop over the sex scene is an unforced error, and the alien squid substitution is defensible while the whole third act still plays as summary rather than tragedy. Ambitious, impressive, and slightly beside the point.