It is not terribly surprising that Zach Synder’s film adaptation of Alan Moore’s “unfilmable” graphic novel Watchmen is receiving a mixed critical review. The film’s subject material is intense and uncomfortable, and at nearly three hours long it is not afraid to make significant demands of its viewers. Watchmen directly asks what no other superhero movie has ever had the courage or audacity to posit: Is society actually worth saving? In this sense Watchmen is not just about the flawed psychologies of its costumed adventurers; it is perhaps the first superhero movie to take the concept of universal sin seriously. The traditional superhero film employs a formulaic template: Evil threatens the established social order until good intervenes. The roles of good and evil are clearly and easily defined. This simple narrative structure is built on two premises that, until recently, have gone unchallenged in the genre. The first is the unambiguous coupling of the hero with the moral good and the villain with moral evil. Films like last year’s Ironman and, even more directly, The Dark Knight pushed against this premise and thrust the hero/villain relationship into a much more complicated world of moral ambiguity. The second premise, though, has until now remained virtually unassailable, and it is this element that makes Watchmen so interesting and so difficult to digest. The second premise is that society is worth saving, that the social order under threat is worthy of salvation. Kevin Boyd ☀
Monday 30 March 2009
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