A lemon as big as they come

Rating: 1/10 (23 May 2010)

The gist: If you are not a die-hard fan of The Watchmen already, don't watch it.
This is definitely the absolutely worst movie I have seen. If not *the* worst, it's right up there. The characters are shallow, acting mediocre, dialogues empty and the fight sequences boring. There are some good scenes - the Vietnam war scene and the jail fight sequence with Rorschach come to mind. But these are scarcely enough to make up for the other atrocious 160 minutes that is Watchmen.
I confess: I have not read the book. But like some other reviewers here have pointed out, a movie has to stand by itself. Watchman fails to do that. Miserably. The fans of the book would no doubt enjoy the way in which their superhero characters have been brought to life. But I thought that the depiction of the characters was extremely shallow. The Silk Spectre, especially, does little else except copulate with the other male characters in between flashback scenes. When I think about it, the characters themselves (as the authors of the book originally developed them) are phenomenal, but the movie does a dismal job of accenting their intricacies.
The movie also attempts to be overly dramatic. The scenes where Dr. Manhattan goes off on his philosophical trips get extremely annoying after awhile. And the relentless onslaught of flashback scene after flashback scene deadens your senses soon enough. While the movie does touch upon some interesting moral issues, these are lost in the swirl of too many slow motion fight sequences and CGI bloated scenes.
To summarize, I think this could have been a fantastic movie that took a unique perspective on superheroes like "The Dark Night" did. But it does not. The most we could hope for from this movie? No sequel by Mr. Zack Snyder.