Faithful, but flawed

Rating: 6/10 (6 March 2009)

Watchmen is Alan Moore's renowned comic series about superheros' attempts to save themselves from obsolescence and to save the humanity from itself. By placing them into a more realistic psychological and emotional context, characterizations point out the perversion of the concept of superheros and the cultural implications of their existence.
As someone who very much appreciated the comic book, the movie was a mixed bag. There are some really great (faithful) translation of parts of the comic book, but overall, I would say that the movie suffered more than benefited from the strict adherence to the source material, as the emotional core of the comics ended up becoming neglected.
(Spoilers ahead)
The biggest failure of the movie was that the nuclear holocaust felt shallow, empty. I generally liked the movie up until that point. The mass killing was served as a linear plot element, not the epic punch to the gut that screamed out the absurdity of the comic book superhero.
Several main reasons why:
-The event is mostly seen through a TV within the film screen, hence making the audience trice-removed from the cataclysmic scale and implications of the mass genocide
-The allegorical pirate story, which mirrors the insanity that drove Ozymandias' actions, is missing from the movie--I did not realize how crucial this was to the understanding of the comic book until I watched the movie
-Matthiew Goode as Ozymandias was not very good--the character Goode constructs is not the super-rational zealot who works toward the "good" of human kind, but rather a one-dimensional comic book villain
Dr. Manhattan's reversal in his decision to help human beings avoid the mass killings felt rather clumsily handled as well.
(End spoilers)
The movie is not a waste of time, but it has some deep flaws. If you're going to see the movie to be entertained, it will, more likely than not, succeed. But it doesn't quite deliver the impact of the original work--with the core missing, it's merely a pretty shell of what it's supposed to have been.