Who watches the Watchmen?

Rating: 7/10 (21 January 2013)

After reading the book, I kind of dreaded watching this movie. But I actually didn't hate it. At all.
The movie is very faithful to the book's script, moving around lines when necessary. This only bothered me at the end when Silk Spectre II got Dr. Manhattan's line "nothing ever ends."
Manhattan's special effects work very well. He looks exactly like he should (dick and all), but his voice lacks a certain quality that a godlike being should have. He sounds like a moody teenager.
Silk Spectre II looks the part, except she isn't wearing silk, she's wearing latex. I have no problem with this change, since it makes sense that her mother would want her to be more modern, and thus successful. I understand that Zach Snyder wanted all young actors in this movie, but Silk Spectre II suffers the worst from poor dramatic timing in her lines that a more experienced actor would have aced. The actors playing Rorschach and the Comedian were surprisingly great, and saved the movie for me.
Zach Snyder's use of slow motion is often mocked by critics, but it worked at certain parts in this movie. The Comedian being thrown out the window, for example, looked great in slow motion. The fight that comes right before this event, however, would have been much better in real time, especially since it supposed to be made ironic by the sweet background music.
Zach Snyder also uses tons of violence, but then again, so did the graphic novel. The only part where I found myself laughing at the violence was during the assassination attempt on Ozymandias when a woman's CGI fingers get blown off for no apparent reason in slow motion. The CGI is good, for 2009. Dr. Manhattan and his structure on Mars look magnificent, but CGI blood and gore never seems to look just right.
The opening credits, a fantastic sequence explaining the rise and fall of the Minutemen and Watchmen set to a Bob Dylan song, is easily the best part of the movie. The soundtrack, by the way, is fantastic.
Now that all of that is out of the way, we come to the important part: Alan Moore. His works have been adapted into movies before, with varying degrees of success, but Moore declares that he hates any movie version of his work and refuses to watch them. Who watches the Watchmen? Not Alan Moore. Zach Snyder has said that he would like for Moore to give this movie a chance, since it is a fairly faithful adaptation of Moore's work. But that's exactly the problem. It's fairly faithful. It doesn't change enough of the original to feel like a new experience, but changes too much to feel like a truly faithful adaptation. I think Mr. Moore can skip watching this one.
Concerning Snyder's changes to the story, I have mixed feelings. The idea of Ozymandias turning the world against Dr. Manhattan instead of aliens actually worked for me. I would like to know why Alan Moore didn't use that idea in the first place. I'm sure it occurred to him. The change I disliked was Snyder leaving out the stories of the newspaper vendor and comic book reader, the lesbian couple, and the psychiatrist and his wife. They made the book feel that much more real, and made the disaster near the end feel that much more painful and powerful. Snyder should have included these stories. Time obviously wasn't an issue, since the director's cut is three hours long.
Overall, the movie is okay. It's not really worth watching if you've read the book, but it's not terrible. The opening credits, the performances of Rorschach and the Comedian, and the Mars sequence all make this movie good, but it is flawed by excessive slow-motion, CGI blood and gore, inexperienced supporting actors, and missing elements of the book.