Review: Watchmen Film Straddles Line Between Loyalty, Heresy

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2015)

One could call bringing Watchmen to the big screen a thankless job. In finally adapting the greatest comic ever written, director Zack Snyder has triumphed under pressure where true visionaries like Darren Aronofsky and Terry Gilliam have failed. He has successfully turned Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' brilliant comics mini-series into a must-see movie for every Watchmen fan boy in the land. If only it were that simple.
As a devoted fan of the comic and its writer, it is hard for me to call Watchmen a great film. Caught between its loyalty to the source material and a desire to carve out its own legend, the R-rated epic is a bloody mess with its still-beating heart in the right place. But its head isn't in the game, unless that game is all about marketing blitzes, product tie-ins and raking in Dumpsters full of cash. If those are the stakes, then it's game over: Snyder has locked down the championship win.
Turning Watchmen into a fan-pleasing film was undeniably a daunting task. It could be argued that no one could make a movie that would live up to the comics' dense, meta fictional, inter textual triumph, which effectively deconstructed the superhero genre through its tapestry of flawed characters and bold political themes.