So-what-men

Rating: 2/10 (8 October 2009)

I finally staggered through to the end of the movie, but it was a pretty hard slog; by twenty minutes in my girlfriend had decided that it was boring and found better things to do, and I was seriously flagging after an hour and a half. To be honest, I could have found better things to do than watch the rest of the movie myself.
It's a couple of decades since I read 'Watchmen' the comic, but aside from a few changes to the ending, the movie seems to be a pretty direct copy of the comic to the screen, and that's one of the big flaws; that worked for 300, because it's basically a bunch of action scenes with some talking in between, but a comic as pretentious, talky and full of narration as 'Watchmen' makes for a very dull movie.
And the direct translation from comic to screen is also problematic in another way: 'Watchmen' the comic just isn't very good.
Sure, it may have won a bazillion awards, but ultimately it's a decent idea that was poorly developed; the end result is not particularly interesting characters doing not particularly interesting things while indulging in lefty student philosophising in a not particularly original plot. Had 'Watchmen' been a novel or a movie, it would have vanished into obscurity, it only received acclaim as a comic because so few comics of that era made any pretense at intelligent characterisation or plot.
Another problem is that Moore himself seems to have little sympathy for anyone to the right of Stalin, and a writer with no sympathy for his characters can hardly expect the readers to have much sympathy for them either; Moore can do a good job with a 'superhero' like V (for Vendetta), but every character in 'Watchmen', with the possible exception of Rorshach, is basically a cardboard cutout.
So ultimately we end up with a highly over-rated comic turned into a horribly boring movie where people I don't care about do things I don't care about for reasons I don't care about; and the only mildly sympathetic character is killed off by the others. Don't make the same mistake I did: you can find much better things to do with three hours of your life than watch this movie and then shrug 'so what?' at the end.