good, not great

Rating: 6/10 (7 March 2009)

This movie is mixed bag. The plot is intriguing. The special effects are well done. The acting is decent. The movie's creators were very faithful to the source material-almost slavishly so.
I think it was mistake to set the movie in the same era as the comic. The comic took place in the 80's, but that is when it was written. Perhaps they could have updated the story as "Iron Man" did last year. All the old music and cultural reference made me fell like I was watching one of those TV movies like "The Sixties" or "The Seventies" that NBC did a while ago. They should have toned it down a little. Not only is it the 80's, it's an alternate 80's where Nixon is still president. (What is with Nixon being so prominently featured in movies lately?) If they took the Nixon scenes out, I would not complain. That aspect of the movie might have been very confusing if I hadn't already read the comic.
The violence and the sexual content in the movie were graphic, even more so than in the comic from what people have said. I don't remember because I haven't read it in a while. The characters are all morally ambiguous for the most part. Some of the nihilism and reductionism(probably from the comic itself) just seems silly, particularly Dr. Manhattan's comment about living and dead organisms being indistinguishable because they have the same number of particles.
I though the complex interplay of good and evil was much more well done in the Dark Knight. On the other hand, Rorshach's devotion to truth here is more admirable than Batman's was at the end of the latter movie.