WATCHMEN!? More like WATCHSEVEN!

Rating: 7/10 (9 March 2009)

Firstly, I must say that I have read The Watchmen novel about 3 months in advance due to the very effective Watchmen trailer (Smashing Pumpkins song was perfectly used). I must say that this film was good but had a lot of near crippling flaws.
I'll start with the bad. The acting was horrid. Especially bad for Silk Spector, and passable to mostly terrible from the other actors. Many of them you could tell were struggling with the dialogue (or shall we say adherence to the source material). I'm still debating if this the result of Snyder not being able to get performances out of an actor, a victim of a bad script, or generally just bad casting. Either way, it definitely hurt the character driven scenes of which most of the movie is made up of.
The length (or shall we say adherence to the source material again) was at a whopping 2 hours and 45 minutes, which is hard to do right even in the hands of a crafted director, and near impossible for an unproven director in Zack Snyder. The movie draws many of its scenes and lines from the movie. Not much is left out. And not much is rewritten or adapted. And this lack of adaptation is the main source of many of this movie's flaws. Nothing was edited out, and the dialog could have been sped up to keep the flow of the movie going, not to mention sound more real. Zack Snyder said he wanted to do Watchmen right, and I think that's what most fans wanted of the novel wanted and he did a great job with that.
Despite what was done wrong with the movie, there are still things that make it worth a watch (if your not a fan). The most notable being that the original novel presents such a clever and interesting premise, that really should be experienced in one form or another.
The visual style looked nice and shiny. The production was really top notch. The lighting looked right, the costumes, and the set design were great. Snyder's tried and true slow motion is mostly well used throughout the film. If you liked the slow motion fight scenes of 300 you can expect the same for Watchmen. The action scenes just like those in 300 look nice, and offer up some new ideas, but in the end are nothing really notable.
But, as a movie it didn't quite come out as was to be hoped. With a skilled writer I do believe the Watchmen could have been a great movie, but it needed to be better adapted to the film. The flow of the novel was just not suitable for a film. The novel employs a somewhat clever deployment of back stories and transitions but they did not emphasize the characters as much as you'd expect from a movie. The audience was not attached to the characters because of a lack of focus or emphasis of the characters in the script.
I give this movie a low 7s rating. Let's say 7.3, not a higher seven because of the the penis to boobie scene ratio?