The ingredients of a great movie, baked into an okay one.

Rating: 7/10 (31 August 2018)

It's a little hard for me to form a solid opinion on this movie. The only thing I'm certain of is that it could have been better, but I'm not exactly sure how. It just feels like a B-level effort was brought to every aspect of the story, resulting in a C-level story. I think what the movie may be lacking is a cohesive theme. Everything else is in place: decent characters, a fairly interesting world, a villainous plan that surpasses most, and obviously the cool directing style of Zach Snyder. It just needed something to tie it all together and give it meaning.
It seems like this would have worked better as either a TV mini-series or with a simplified plot. Much of the dissatisfaction I think comes from spending a disproportionate amount of time with certain characters and plots. We don't see a whole lot of Ozymandius throughout the movie, which makes the reveal of him as the villain less impactful than it might have been. There seemed to be too much time spent with Silk Specter's relationships with Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl. And all of the time we spent with the characters felt a little misplaced and pointless, particularly in the case of Rosharch. We learn a bit about each one, but what we learn never really becomes important. I would assume that the characters' and their backstories tie into the plot much better in the graphic novel, but it just felt like they were focusing on the wrong things here.
There were a few things that also felt out of place. The fact that Rosharch takes off his mask about two-thirds of the way through felt wrong somehow, like a betrayal of him as a character. The limitations on Dr. Manhattan's abilities were a little too convenient and ended up complicating things unnecessarily. The most glaring issue was that we mostly viewed the story through Silk Specter and Nite Owl's perspectives when they weren't nearly as involved in the major plot of the story as Rosharch, Dr. Manhattan, and Ozymandius were.
I don't like that all of this review is negative, because there are a lot of good things about this movie. But it's hard to talk about them without acknowledging how they fail to have any kind of satisfying payoff. It's easy to see a movie and point out story problems as an outsider, but it's quite another thing to come up with valid ideas for how to fix them. However, this is a rare case where I feel like I could have written a better version of this movie. It wouldn't be a perfect version, and to be fair I haven't read the source material, but I think that I could put this story together in a way that made more dramatic and thematic sense. This is not to suggest that the screenwriters who adapted this did a bad job, they may have pushed for a different version and did an admirable job with what was surely a very difficult adaptation. I just feel like a story with raw elements as good as Watchmen has deserves to get a better treatment than it got. I did like that the movie had the guts to let the villain truly win and destroy any chance for a sequel, but even this ending seems like kind of a cop-out to developing interesting arcs and themes. Overall Rating: 7.3/10.