Clock-Watching

Rating: 4/10 (21 February 2010)

Watchmen falls into a time-honoured trap of comic adaptations: spending a long time on back-stories that really only add to the film's girth, rather than give it any dramatic bite.
It feels like the makers were trying to please too many people. The back-stories were presumably for viewers who had not read the comics - but perhaps also for those who had enjoyed the source material and would have complained about missing characters, plot elements, etc. Given the unavoidable omissions, the catcalls are bound to come anyway.
So Watchmen waddles its way through almost three hours, failing to ramp up the tension due to its plethora of characters and multiple flashbacks. Barely credibly, there are also two even longer "director's cuts". Good luck to those who have so much spare time on their hands.
This writer would have preferred a shorter, snappier film which binned the back-stories and focused on one or two characters. It might not have been faithful to the comic - but as its writer, Alan Moore, despises all film adaptations of his work, what was the point in attempting a reverent homage when a creative desecration could have been so much more enjoyable?