150 minutes of awesome, 10 minutes of lame

Rating: 9/10 (26 March 2009)

Even though I hated the ending. I have to give this a 9 for the rest. The opening credits are a masterpiece. The plot is intricate and tense, Carla Gugino is Silk Specter (nothing more need be said) and Rorschach in prison ("You don't understand. I'm not locked in here with you - you're locked in here with me.") is utterly menacing. The breakout scene is dazzling. The visual effects are stunning, especially Dr. Manhattan's Fortress of Solitude (sorry, the comparison is irresistible) on Mars. Flashbacks tell the back story effectively. And then it fizzles like a balloon with a slow leak. They can generate tachyons which can travel backward in time. So why can't Dr. Manhattan time travel and prevent the catastrophe? And so the world thinks it was attacked by Dr. Manhattan and puts away all its differences and everybody joins hands and sings "We are the world." Uh-huh. For a couple of months max, then what? What I was really hoping was Dr. Manhattan would travel back to 1972 and switch over to our own time line. And please spare me the argument that the ending is faithful to the graphic novel. If the novel ends the same way, it's lame, regardless of its other merits.