by Chris Feil
Ten years on and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is remembered as a overly loyal misfire. But originally our hopes were sky high for this adaptation, a long-awaited superhero take for adults sourced from one of the most lauded tomes in graphic novel history. Maybe when it arrives this year, Damon Lindelof’s incoming HBO “continuation” series can satisfy our passion for Alan Moore’s original creation - however unlikely it is that is satisfies Moore himself.
Perhaps the single thing that set the film up for failure was the very one that made us think Snyder had pulled off the impossible: it’s stunning teaser trailer set to The Smashing Pumpkins’ “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning”. It was one of the best teasers of an era when that still mattered, and we fans went crazy. But ultimately the song choice was writing checks musically that the film itself couldn’t cash...
The song is the right twist of irony to match Moore’s text. It originates from the Batman and Robin soundtrack, a piece of franchise merchandising that symbolizes everything Moore was denouncing about the genre and corporate culture. In that context, the song choice here is both unexpected and precise, promising a judgment day for everything that had been driven into the ground. Particularly on the heels of The Dark Knight, it felt like a revolution was coming for genre storytelling.
Also: yeah, it was just really fucking cool. And smart. The song choice struck exactly the right tone to tell us (and general audiences unprepared for such a grim superhero vision) exactly what this was going to be. It sure as hell made the visual goods look and feel a lot like what Moore had captured on the page, the gorgeous brooding vision of our highest hopes.
Cut to the film itself, where its musical tastes spell out a lot of its pretensions and missteps. Not only does the film not use this ingenious needle drop, but it almost feels like its chasing its wow factor. Comparatively, the film’s song choices are all too familiar and already culturally significant. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, while thematically astute for what was on the page, becomes an overlong wank of a credits montage. Simon and Garfunkle’s “Sound of Silence” too slickly plays over a literal funeral.
The attempt to subvert a certain era of American iconography is all too obvious compared to what felt keenly observed in Moore’s telling. It sounds like someone who is telling us how cool they are rather than how the teaser showed us something that was just cool.
And it gets to its worst, the starkest contrast to the teaser’s brilliance, when it turns Leonard Cohen’s legendary “Hallelujah” into sex music. A wildly uncomfortably composed sequence in its own right, it becomes a moment that’s laughably try-hard in its own seriousness. It wasn’t just a strange and wholly bad song choice, but it also made us say “enough!” with “Hallelujah” as a cultural reference point. Like Cohen’s song, Watchmen quickly became a beautiful funeral.
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