The Ultimate Edition is A Lot Better

Rating: 10/10 (20 August 2010)

I first reviewed this movie after having seen it in theaters in March of 2009 when it was first released. I had a mixed reaction to it. On the one hand, I loved how faithful Snyder was to the source material. But on the other, in trying to squeeze all 12 issues of the comic book series into a single movie, the film felt strangely paced, and seemed to lose a lot of viewers who weren't already familiar with the source material.
Since that time, three different versions of this film have been released on DVD and Bluray. The theatrical cut, which is the shortest version, and by shortest I mean 2 hours and 40 minutes. This is the version shown in theaters, and the version most people reviewed. At the same time, they also released a 3 hour long Director's Cut. The Director's Cut added a few nice scenes that improve the movie somewhat, but don't really improve the pacing, which still has the problem of feeling like an episodic story told awkwardly as a single film.
Several months later, however, a third cut of the film was released. This one, called the Ultimate Cut, is over 3 and a half hours long and includes an animated version of the graphic novel's comic within a comic "Tales of the Black Freighter", a pirate comic that mirrors the struggle of the main characters of The Watchmen. Ironically the addition of these animated segments, that periodically interrupt the flow of the main storyline, actually improve the pacing the film.
Whereas the previous cuts felt more like slow plodding action movies that often lost itself in its exposition, the Ultimate cut doesn't feel like an action movie at all, and instead feels more like a philosophical deconstruction of our own moralities and commonly held beliefs. This is closer to what Alan Moore had in mind when he wrote the series, and the Ultimate Cut captures this essence, where the original theatrical version and Director's Cut fell short.
The movie is brilliant, mainly because the graphic novel is brilliant. Moore's writing, influenced by Nietzsche's ideas of existentialism, is beautifully worded, and Snyder was wise to stay as close to the source material as he did. There are a few minor flaws, mainly the scenes with the Silk Spectre, whose acting was good, but did not measure up to the task. Also, I didn't like the vomiting scene cutting into the beautiful "Sound of Silence" funeral procession. But these are minor nitpicks that are more than made up for by a brilliantly crafted and well paced film.
I have to give this a 10/10, a great improvement over my initial reaction to the theatrical cut. It's too bad this wasn't the version released in theaters, it may have gotten a better critical reception. But then again, I'm not sure many would have been able to sit through a 3 and a half hour movie.