Unsurprisingly Incomplete

Rating: 5/10 (8 March 2009)

Let me start off by saying that I HAVE read the novel. I'm not one of those people who went to go so see it because 300 was "awesome" and it has super heroes in it.
That said, this is one of those movies that was destined to be somewhat incomplete. There really is no way that any film adaptation could have possibly included all the elements from the novel, like Tales of the Black Freighter and Under the Hood, for example, but there were just too many omissions and glaring inaccuracies for the film to capture any of the novel's genius.
WIthout spoiling anything, I feel like I have to list at least some of the stuff from the novel that I liked the most that was, for whatever reason, not included in the movie. Along with the aforementioned "Tales" and "Under the Hood," there is no back-story of the Minutemen. the previous generation of heroes (which includes Sally Jupiter and the Comedian), none of the converging subplots revolving the newsstand guy, the comic book kid, the detectives, the psychiatrist and his wife, no Laurie back-story, no Ozymandias back-story, etc., etc. I suppose the film works as a direct adaptation of the Watchmen story, as in the events between the Comedian's murder and the cataclysm in New York (which is changed in this version). However, the novel's strength, in my mind, is the way it supplements the story of the costumed heroes of the present events with all the events and characters that surround and preceded them.
Another thing that bothered me but probably won't bother anyone else, is the degree to which the movie is so "popcorn-ified." The novel didn't really have much fighting. There was violence, but not huge brawls. The movie has the same over stylized fighting from 300, sometimes using totally random slow motion that does nothing but look really stupid. There are a number of fights/battles that are either fabricated or embellished to the extreme, with 4 marauding thugs turning into dozens, presumably to satisfy brain-dead moviegoers who expect a high body count. The level of violence for violence's sake at times reaches fetishistic levels. I just didn't enjoy watching it all that much.
For all its faults, though, the most prominent in the film HAS to be the soundtrack. With the exception of the awesome opening credits sequence, this has to be the most bizarre and inappropriate collection of songs in a film I have ever seen/heard. Not only that, but the way the film is edited to the music is really jarring and abrupt, either for effect or because of time considerations. For example, during one of the climactic scenes between Dr. Manhattan and Laurie, probably one of the only scenes to work well in my opinion, the moment lingers for about 1 second before a smash cut to Dan and Rorschach in Antarctica, flying along to Jimi Hendrix. This one moment irked me most, but the same sort of stuff happened through out the whole movie.
I hate to be so negative, but I have to say that the acting was mostly pretty bad, the worst being Malin Ackerman. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach is really fantastic though. When you see him without his mask, you see his face, and you see that he twitches and seethes with anger. It's kind of hard to buy BIlly Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, probably because he is computer generated, and I couldn't get over his kind of insubstantial voice. I always imagined Dr. Manhattan as having a deep, booming voice more in line with his ethereal presence. Whatever.
One of the things that I found most puzzling, not necessarily in a negative way, was how the film ignores some of the most obvious and effective visual cues from the novel. I would have to spoil stuff to explain a lot of them, and I don't want to do that, but if you read the novel you would probably also see that some of the most dramatic and iconic images and panels don't make it into the film.
Like I said, there was probably no way any filmmaker could include everything in a movie version of Watchmen and keep it under 5 hours. It probably wasn't as bad as my long list of its perceived problems and inadequacies might suggest, but its not really that great either. I feel like it was made for people who haven't read the book to understand, and that's not me, so I can't support it wholeheartedly.