Faithful to its source, visually compelling, but lacking emotional depth

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2010)

(Please note that my comments are based upon the director's cut DVD.)
Zack Snyder was either extremely brave or incredibly foolhardy--maybe a little bit of both--to take on the unenviable task of adapting Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen to the screen. Many people--including Moore himself--considered the source material impossible to transfer to film, and after viewing this well-intentioned, mostly faithful, but emotionally flat version of the graphic novel, I'm convinced that they were right.
Still, it's not all bad. Snyder, cinematographer Larry Fong, and their teams give us a visually rich feast that fully realizes the world of the graphic novel... and then some. The acting is, for the most part, top notch, with Jack Earle Haley's Rorschach and Jeff Morgan as the Comedian being the stand outs. Everyone else carries their roles well, with the exception of Malin Ackerman, who while easy on the eyes doesn't bring enough emotional depth to her role as Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II.
And to me, it's that same lack of emotional heft which is the main problem with this film. Snyder et al attempt to be as faithful to the graphic novel as they can, but inevitably they have to leave some things--actually, a lot of things--out. By packing the film full of all the characters of the source material, they do justice to none of them, leaving their stories feeling shallow.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some fan-boy decrying the loss of his favourite scene from the comic, like those who criticized the Lord of the Rings movies for leaving out Tom Bombadil. It's just that all the characters' stories feel rushed; even if I hadn't read the original material I would have sensed that there was a lot, too much in fact, that we weren't being shown. We don't see enough of Dan's and Laurie's relationship developing; we don't get to see enough of Rorschach's past, nor the growing horror of his therapist as he's slowly dragged into the vigilante's world; we don't see enough of Dr. Manhattan's gradual disconnect from the world and the people in it; we don't see enough of Laurie's repugnance for the Comedian. As a result, I felt interested but unmoved as events in the film transpired. I wasn't bored, as Watchmen is almost always visually intriguing, but I never felt emotionally involved.
Ironically, it's when Watchmen strays from its source material that it's at its best. For example, the best action sequence in the film was when Silk Spectre II and Night Owl II take on several prisoners during a riot--a scene that doesn't occur in the comic, not to that extent. Also, in the film, Hollis Mason, the original Night Owl, goes down fighting (a scene which I think was added for the DVD version), which is true to and evocative of his past as a masked adventurer, making his death all the more affecting, because he's not just fighting a group of thugs, he's combating an enemy he can never defeat: old age. And the film's ending achieved something I would not have thought possible: it improved on Alan Moore's original finale. Watchmen's concluding plot twist is a logical outcome from all that transpired before it, and it seems like it would have been more believable than the graphic novel's mock alien invasion.
However, without a proper investment and anchor in the lives of the underdeveloped characters, the ending, as good as it is, leaves one feeling flat and unmoved. There were too many characters for us to get to know, so we don't really get to know any of them; as a result, we don't feel deeply about what happens to any of them. I mentioned above that Watchmen is often at its best when it departs from the original. Perhaps it fails because it didn't do this often enough. Perhaps Snyder should have been even braver and focused on a smaller number of characters and fewer plot points. The result would not have been as true to the graphic novel, but it probably would have been a better movie.