You'll Watch The Watchmen - Once.

Rating: 5/10 (5 March 2009)

A case of staying a little TOO faithful to the source material.
While it's cool to see some of the images translated directly to the screen (and in IMAX), the script also borrows a bit too much of the dialogue directly from the page, which doesn't always work - the movie fails to flesh out the characters enough to fill the big screen for nearly three hours. Only Patrick Wilson manages to evoke any real sympathy and hint at a person who might be three-dimensional under the makeup/costume. I also liked Billy Crudup's performance as Dr. Manhattan, but since he's essentially playing an emotionless time bomb, our empathy doesn't lie with him. As in the source material, it's pretty easy to predict who the "villain" is, though his motivation here is muddled and unconvincing - hinging on the typical last-minute "bad guy explains wicked plot" exposition (which didn't work so well in Moore's book, either, but suffers even more in the movie). Rorschach once again provides the dark heart of the story, though I wish they hadn't made him deliver all his lines in that Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice. He's supposed to be a twisted take on Raymond Chandler-esquire gumshoes, but all that growling makes it hard to take him seriously.
As expected, there are a few terrific action sequences, though the film could have used more of them, and expanded upon what's in the book. Some of them seem too short. It was refreshing to see very adult-level sex and nudity in a comic book film - although I have to say it, the constant presence of Dr. Manhattan's penis gets incredibly, almost laughably, distracting. It should come as no surprise that the director of 300 lingers most on the graphic violence - but without the weight and depth of the book, it comes across more like torture porn than Moore probably intended. The gruesomeness of the graphic novel always seemed to be serving a larger, cautionary purpose - here, it's much less tasteful.
That's the crucial shortcoming of Watchmen the movie - Zack Snyder's inability to grasp the meaning behind Watchmen, and why it was so groundbreaking in the first place. He doesn't quite seem in on the joke that this is a sendup of the greed and violence present in American culture - and the heroes we invent to cope with that. He's much more interested in bringing the violence and images to life than he is the insight into human nature and larger themes. The graphic novel made doomsday feel imminent and terrifying, but here it's just a plot device - the tried-and-true "Manhattan in peril" formula. This works overall until the third act, which feels forced (and not merely because of the one major deviation from the source material - I'd say the last few chapters of the comics is where Moore's storytelling faltered a bit, too, though not to the extent it does here).
Watchmen deserved a visionary filmmaker to expand upon the daring, revolutionary genius of the graphic novel; instead it got one who is merely faithful to it, without making the additions necessary to translate it to the silver screen. It's fun to watch, but it doesn't get under your skin like Alan Moore's comics or give you much reason to care what's happening. Worth watching once for the overall coolness factor, but doesn't nearly pack the same emotional punch as the graphic novel.