Fails as an Adapation, Fails as a Movie

Rating: 5/10 (14 March 2009)

I have some difficulty judging this movie. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic book has become one of my favorite books. I've been rereading it for some six years now, always reveling in the new things I find out or just enjoying the dialogue, action and characters. It's a dense, multi-layered, delightful piece of literature.
So I dreaded the adaptation, and yet I couldn't resist watching it. I knew no movie could do justice to a work that was crafted so finely for the comics medium. We live in an age in which so-called writers write garbage that looks like scripts waiting to be shot. Dan Brown's novels come to mind. Watchmen was not that: every page had the language of comics on it.
Mr. Zack Snyder evidently doesn't understand that medium nor the one he has decided to work on, for he confuses both. His confusion begins with treating the panels of Gibbons as storyboards. What works in a static medium doesn't work in another in which movement is the key-word. Obviously the movie sounds flat and lifeless, a bit like Sin City, another movie which just turned comics panels into frames.
Then Snyder, being a mediocre director, can't even use his medium to good use. Someone should tell that man that just because cameras have an option called slow-mo it shouldn't be used. Everything stops in this movie: a guy jumps, there's a stop; a house explodes, a stop; a kick, a stop. I guess that's meant to be dramatic, but it's just silly.
The costumes are mostly appalling. Most seem non-functional, too heavy and hardly suitable for superheroes. And some must have come straight from Batman & Robin's wardrobe; thankfully the nipples are absent. In an age in which superhero movies have come a long way since this awful movie, and has given us great costumes in Spider-Man, Batman Begins, X-Men, Iron Man and Superman, it's sad the costumes of Watchmen look so awful. Exception goes to Rorschach, whose shifting mask is great. Dr. Manhattan is also amazing, but then in this day and age CGI characters are hardly remarkable.
The script is god-awful, and I guess David Hayter takes responsibility for that. The characters are one-dimensional (but then the actors aren't that great either) and the plot runs at a frantic pace. Patrick Wilson did a great job with Nite Owl, and I liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian. But most seemed to be spouting their lines just for the paycheck without ever believing their characters.
In the end it's a fun, campy movie that takes itself too seriously without having any artistic substance to do so. A friend told me the fans won't like it, and the average viewers will find it boring. I don't agree: I think it can be enjoyed by either group, but for anyone who's read the comic it disappoints; and for anyone who likes cinema in itself, it disappoints too. But it entertains and I don't regret the 160 minutes I spent watching it.