If it ain't broke, please don't remake it...

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2009)

If I was Alan Moore, right now, I would feel somewhat like "The Comedian". I would be laughing at the great joke that Watchman turned out to be.
Alan Moore was right. There are certain things a comic book or graphic novel can do that film cannot. I'm a film follower first. It is a much more entertaining medium, after all a movie reads for me. And there is a lot a film CAN do that is impossible to recapture in any other art form, such as songwriting, painting, etc. But the story of the Watchmen was never meant to be lifted from its pages to the big screen.
Their are just too many details a comic can preserve in front of you, transfixed long enough to be studied so the smallest detail can become aware. A movie cannot do this.
In a comic, it is accepted to survey several backstories of multiple characters at a time. One cannot be overwhelmed this way, because a READER can stop, flip back a few pages and review the material that they were just being asked to accept. If you are having a hard time keeping up with the parallels between the old and new "Minutemen" flip back a couple pages and read it again. If you didn't quite understand Dr. Manhattan's conversation on Mars and its irony concerning time and human matters, you can stop and allow time for insight.
VIEWERS do not have this pleasure. When a viewer is forced to absorb four flashbacks, one on top of the other, the movie's time line degrades and the viewer loses interest.
Again when the comic book series came out was what made the series so revolutionary. It was a time in comic book history where the biggest problem a superhero had was who was robbing Chase Manhattan today. Alan Moore stepped in and gave real lives to his fictional comic book characters. These characters lived and breathed, they drank when they were unhappy, they had sex, they even had bad breath in the morning. They had something no other comic book personalities shared. Flaws.
The world was not ready for a Watchmen movie. The average movie-goer is not yet bored with the same superhero movie paradigm. They still want to see more special effects and wire-fu especially over something as menial as story, right? A comic book reader, or reader in general, has nothing to look forward to but the story and its substance. It is easier to put down a book than walk out of a theater.
But Snyder did his best to appease the average superhero movie senses. There is a lot of bone crunching and neck breaking action. And the entire movie looks great and is directed like it was from somebody on top of their game, because it was. This movie looks, sounds, and watches just fine. It just looks, sounds, and READS better. The fact that Hollywood had to change the ending of the book goes to show the comic never should have made a film debut.
Ironic enough Hollywood fought and fought to keep the rights from going to Alan Moore and his company. After witnessing the crowd's response to the film tonight, I have a feeling Moore is not going to have too much trouble getting the rights now.
What was the icing on this cake of sheer irony is the song that exits the film. Desolation Row is a song hailed to be one of the better Dylan songs of his whole songwriting career. The fact that it was perverted by "My Chemical Romance" of all bands, just proves a point I've been trying to make: some things should not be meddled with.
(this was piece is presented raw and not proof read. All typographical errors remain unchanged and untempered)