Watchmen: Director's Cut

Zack Snyder's long trumpeted Watchmen: Director's Cut finally arrives. There's little indication if this is Snyder's preferred edit, or a just a cash-in that has been rolled out to keep the property fresh. It doesn't help that there's another longer edit on the horizon either. That said, away from inflated, possessive expectation, Snyder's film fares a little better. Director's Cuts always threaten a transformative quality. An incomplete thesis made whole by the addition of discarded, mutant material. Great examples include the identity crisis dreamscape introduced to Blade Runner, or the maternal angst added to Aliens. Both a digression too far for cinema screening. Unfortunately, the term is massively devalued now, bandied about for every other teen-baiting head wringer desperate to court extra sell-through sales on home video. Knowing that Watchmen's alien invasion ending wasn't even filmed does take the shine off proceedings - despite early reports indicating that Cloverfield monster man Neville Page was on the case. In that sense the film will always be 'imperfect'.

The earliest additions to this Watchmen are witless, violent inflections that stall flow and further paint these street avengers as X-types. Nuance does, eventually, begin to creep in though. Rorschach's fevered narration is finally allowed to digress into the bigoted, a crucial character trait that coasted on the big screen. Laurie's memories of a father prickle earlier too, while Nite Owl II loses it with a (relative) innocent. Best of all is Hollis Mason's bow-out, a straining Queensbury box against otaku thugs intercut with brief recollections of the enemies he vanquished in his heyday. Unfortunately, Snyder can't help cuing up Pietro Mascagni's Intermezzo, from the opera Cavalleria rusticana, famous for scoring Scorsese's Raging Bull. I'm still not sure if these music choices are designed to stress archetypes, or a desire to position Watchmen: The Movie as a work built out of the scraps of an auteur-focused Hollywood that likely wouldn't have existed in this timeline. No Vietnam loss means no introspective 1970s. Either way, it's still rather flawed in execution. Recognisable music attributed to an incongruous image creates a hurdle. Are we supposed to be patting ourselves on the back for recognising the reference? Or chuckling at the co-opt? Regardless, isn't that breaking scene?

Most disappointing of all is the continued lack of an origin story, or sequence, for Matthew Goode's Ozymandias. On a second viewing, Watchmen's fragmented narrative displays a talent for exactly the immersive digression that Moore's text thrived on. A big screen portrayal of Veidt's journey into intellectual hubris would have made for a thrilling counterpoint to Osterman's filmed brushes with infinity. In both versions of the film currently available, Veidt is far too functionary. A rootless sort who haunts the film's fringes, displaying an obvious air of menace that somewhat blows the impending twist. Maybe the Black Freighter bleed-in will bolster this angle? The tale informing the predicament Veidt finds himself in? Regardless, Snyder's Watchmen has become easier to admire on subsequent rolls. There's less inclination to call foul on the many deletions and alterations. In particular, the exaggerated hyper-violence becomes recognisable as a counter-point to contemporary super-fiction films. It's a shade rougher, mirroring the position that the original comic took. Snyder's film is a faithful but graceless adaptation of material specifically designed to be anti-translation. It hasn't been beaten and tweaked to resemble a knives n' knickers blockbuster, thankfully. Despite many vulgar choices, Snyder's Watchmen is still a rambling digression on thrill-seeking thugs, and the people who watch them.