Great cinema!

Rating: 7/10 (4 May 2009)

This is a wonderful piece of cinema. As a comic-book turned into film, I found it even more satisfying than "300 (2006)". Zack Snyder has the rare ability to humble himself before the original artist. He works like a converter, giving life to the comic book pages without adding any interpretation or look-at-me moments of his own. Every frame looks exactly like it does in the books. More importantly, he did not get tempted to "modernise" the story. Retaining the Nixon, Vietnam and other references kept the story real for both fans of "Watchmen" and people who have only heard of this classic.
The only group that seems to have trashed the movie are journalists (no surprises there!) and people with no prior context of the book-- neither as art, nor as a statement. They tended to equate this with the usual Spiderman and Power Rangers variety of comic-book films, concluding that this movie came out wanting. I came here today when I read a reference in a Wolverine review, comparing its poor reception to the dud that was Watchmen. Gee, how they missed the point!! Wolverine was just lazy film-making, a badly made film with no story/plot/point. Merely squeezing what they could from the stale franchise. Watchmen, on the other hand, is a well-made movie with painstaking attention to detail and incredibly faithful to the source. Comparing the two only justifies the closing of newspapers across the US-- traditional journalists do not seem to go beyond the official Kool-Aid. Whether it is movie reviews or supporting the Iraq war, they merely parrot what appears to them as the "acceptable" view.
Watchmen is a great movie and a must-watch. By anyone over 16 :-)