watchmen

You know that analogy "he just went video-game on them" that commentators use when the likes of Kobe, D. Wade or Bron Bron completely take over the game...

you can apply that to Zach Snyder's aesthetic aplomb. Especially in Watchmen, his latest smoldering gun of commercial cinema following Dawn of the Dead and 300. Zach goes video-game on em.

In Watchmen, he faithfully stays close not only to the source material, but to the essence of graphic novels and comics as a medium. The result is at the same time admirable and unprecedented and a failure on particular levels.

The comic, as an artistic medium, is fragmented and self-contained in boxes of pop art tableau. Furthermore, the comic itself is inherently a satirized and ironic rendering of reality. The perverse manipulation of reality is the comic's chief device to derive commentary and meaning. You put these two characteristics together and you have a film that can drag and easily detach its audience because it has no flow or any capacity for real emotional investment.

I remember after 300 was released many pundits called the movie homoerotic and essentially, a crap shoot of repressed homosexuality. Watchmen proves that Zach Snyder, if anything and regardless of gender or orientation, is simply an extreme voyeur of reality.

Two things I kept imagining when Dr. Manhattan was on Mars was A) What if Darren Aronofsky (who was briefly attached) co-directed with Snyder for Watchmen... and B) I am so using that monologue about "air turning into gold" that Dr. Manhattan uses on Silk Spectre II next time I'm at the club.

Although, I enjoyed the movie, especially how masterful Snyder controls his aesthetics, I am nervous mass cinema will continue down this direction of fragmented, rhythmless, aesthetic-driven movies that have no sense of narrative flow. Like Transformers. This is disturbing to me.

But what I really wanna know is where does Billy Crudup go after playing a symbolic narrativization of god, and conversely, where does Matthew Goode go after playing the devil?