Watchmen (2009, USA)

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen looks gorgeous – you can see every penny of its enormous budget on the screen – but it has no soul. Snyder has taken a wonderfully dense narrative and found a way to make it both an anvil festival and a pointlessly opaque translation. It screams out some of its themes while discarding others with little more than a shrug. There’s a lot of speechifying with very little actual content – in fact, it’s kind of stunning that a film with this much going on is so stupefyingly boring. There’s no sense of impending doom, nuclear or otherwise.

Two more quick points: one – I hope the music supervisor never gets another job, ever. Two – I love how Snyder insisted on pummeling the audience with images of the Twin Towers, despite the fact that even in an alternate reality, they would most likely have been standing in 1985. Just another example of how Snyder always goes for the most obvious idea first, seeking to hide the fact that his movies are little but sound and fury.