Nothing super about Watchmen

Rating: 3/10 (10 March 2009)

I went into Watchmen with relatively low expectations. I never bothered to see 300, and I was certain this would be yet another in a line of poorly made "style over substance" films in which there would be more effort put into the dissociative CGI/video-game effects than any real character development or plot.
What I didn't expect is to find this film to be so incredibly mundane, tedious, and flat-out dull that it would become yawningly hard to watch altogether.
"Who cares?" and "Why now?" were the two big questions I began asking myself before finally drifting off and wondering to myself why they can't make "good" comic book movies anymore like Tim Burton's Batman or Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop. Heck, even Bryan Singer's X-Men was pretty good (which is interesting, being that one of the many screenwriters of this soporific mess also wrote X-Men).
What I found so fun and truly innovative about Robert Rodriguez's superlative adaptation of Sin City was that he was able to accomplish all three goals of a film of this nature: 1) He kept the adaptation relatively close to the urtext, 2) He made something that was stylish, fun, a little kitschy, and still made something worth watching with a good deal of substance, 3) Most importantly, he made a real, true-blue, well-crafted film that couldn't have been made any better whether it was based on another text or not.
Watchmen failed horribly in all of these regards.
I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because I really stopped paying attention after a while, but we're basically left with absolutely nothing new, not an original moment, line of dialogue, or plot line, and very worst of all, none of the characters seemed to be superheroes at all. They just all seemed to be relatively fast and good at karate, I suppose. One character, played by the absolutely terrific actor Jackie Earle Haley (who, like so many of the other young, brilliant actors along this train wreck such as Billy Crudup and Patrick Wilson, seemed to be lost in a lingering soap opera for two hours) literally only had the "power" of having some kind of cloth-mask whose face morphs to different kinds of polygons or something. That's not "super," it's just annoying.
Yawn.
The only character who had any actual discernible powers (even the so-called "smartest person in the world"--the one character whose "superpower" was actually discussed--didn't seem all that "super") was Billy Crudup's absurdly omnipotent Dr. Manhattan who was soooo super that he could do everything and anything--at least in the extremely limited imagination of the writers and director--and thus was rendered equally boring because there was never any sense of risk or tension with this character.
I understand that the movie and the graphic novel are supposed to be about the more existential and "realistic"/psychological realms of the superhero archetype, but even this supposed "postmodern" angle on the superhero trope has been done to death by countless movies and books over the last few years, and much better, too (usually funny, light-hearted fare such as the ambrosial The Incredibles or even the slightly less well-crafted Mystery Men).
Clearly, as is often the case with "movies" of this nature or as with sports and other "soap operas for men" such as professional wrestling, fans have a taste for this kind of thing that blinds them to anything else other than the fact that they're watching crap. As with people who can't get enough of Star Wars, it comes down to the fact that they're watching their dreams come alive on screen, and whether it's good or bad, they could care less...
... kinda like me when I watch drivel like Watchmen. No wonder it's doing so poorly. Hopefully the Hollywood brass will finally take a hint and realize Zack Snyder needs to go where he belongs: making snazzy commercials or maybe a show on Showtime or something.