Not necessarily the best movies ever made, but these are twenty of my favorites, in no particular order.  Each post for the next twenty days will feature a brief discussion of one film (though one or two days will have multiple posts to make up for absences).

Post 18: Watchmen (2009 dir. Zack Snyder)

I was nervous walking into Zack Snyder’s film version of Watchmen. I am an avid fan of the graphic novel, one of my favorite books, and had been since 1986 when it premiered in serialized issues. So imagine the chilling wonder I felt within the first few minutes as the story unfolded, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) thrown from his apartment, and Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They are A-Changin'” strummed along during the opening credits. The song is all Snyder.

What the film absolutely gets right is the setting (an alternate 1985 when Richard Nixon is still President of the United States) and the tone. With the world on the brink of nuclear destruction, as it often was in the 1980s, the murder of one of the Watchmen incites a mystery which unfolds through the persistent investigation of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley in a magnificent performance), the most unstable of the Watchmen, and his one-time partner Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson). Solving the murder is not the climax of the story but rather leads into the final act and all the story’s considered, thoughtful implications about the value of individual human life.

It is that tenacious focus on the themes and the tone which makes this a great film, and one of my favorites. There is a generational story here, the original Watchmen from the 1940s and the current ones in the 1980s. That passage of time becomes personified in the character of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the one hero with God-like supernatural powers, whose own concept of time lives not in chronology but in theoretical physics and relativity. And if mortality is what helps give meaning to human life, how can Manhattan value the lives of anyone without a sense of beginning or ending? Will he come to humanity’s aid, or does he just not see any value in it?

How the story and characters resolve all of this becomes the real beauty of the film. The climax, better here even than in the book (yes, maybe that’s heresy to some, but there it is), is exhausting, exuberant, and emotionally satisfying on every level the film explores. And at the end when Rorschach quietly asks Manhattan, “What are you waiting for?” I got chills and cried. His films can at times be all over the place, but here Snyder, his writers, and production team nailed it. It’s a triumph.