Just Awful

Rating: 2/10 (8 March 2009)

Though it wasn't until about an hour in that I had realized this film was not going to treat the source material with dignity, it was the opening scene of The Comedian's assassination that encompassed everything that was wrong with the film. The actual killing takes about three minutes to happen after the assassin shows up, which is two and a half too many. Their fight goes on as the comedian punches through walls and is thrown through just about every glass object in the apartment before being tossed out of the window. By the time he is killed we've already been taken out of the moment by a "stylistic" fight scene. Totally defeats the point of a shocking beginning.
And that's basically what this film does. It throws around the fight scenes and sex scenes and gore without any notion of their weight. No thought is given to nuance, just spectacular visuals. The main intellectual aspects of the original comic (which are the entire reason it was such a landmark) are almost completely ignored.
The characters are also completely dumbed down. Rorschach is no longer a creative, interesting face to a hero but a batman ripoff vigilante. The entire back-story with his mother is surmised in a brief flashback, which has the line "I should have had that abortion." Really? Couldn't the Nite Owl-Silk Spectre sex scene with the idiotic flame been taken out to make room? The only characters treated with any dignity are Veidt and Dr. Manhattan, though they are portrayed only adequately and no more.
Basically, the film is superfluous, simplistic, and rife with juvenile humor which belongs nowhere near the Watchmen material. Snyder's approach worked with 300 mostly because the graphic novel itself was focused on epic battles and nothing else. Much as in the Dawn of the Dead remake though, he completely misses the mark here and is unable to account for any social commentary or intellect.