A serviceable adaptation that caters mostly to fans

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2019)

"Watchmen" was one of my favorite graphic novels growing up alongside "V for Vendetta" and "The Sandman". How it changed the comic book industry at the time of its printing is legendary.
So naturally there had to be a big screen adaptation at some point, and Zack Snyder brought it to movie-going audiences ... with mixed results.
So much of this film hit all the right notes at the technical level -- cinematography, music, costumes, special effects. It also has a great cast that clearly are committed to their roles.
But Watchmen the movie lacks two critical elements that ultimately relegate it to being a mediocre film. First, the slavish devotion to the source material (except the part about how NYC is destroyed). This is a directorial choice by Snyder that locked him into a poor means of telling the story to audience members who had not read the book. Second, this was further hampered by the vast amount of world-building that had to be cut due to time limits that withheld critical context about how and why events unfolded as they did. Taken together these drawbacks affected everything from character relationships to explaining why the show was so dark and talky and not full of typical superhero action tropes -- like the fact that costumed super-villains didn't exist.
In my mind, this was a repeat of another colossal mistake made just two years before in the movie, The Golden Compass. Like Watchmen, it had to deal with a massive amount of "alternate history" world-building that couldn't be included and also chose to closely adhere to the source material. So in both films you got scene after scene that were perfect renditions of moments from the book, but they lacked all the background that connected one scene to the next. Fans of both series could follow and admire the craftsmanship of seeing these worlds brought to life. Non-fans though were left scratching their heads about what was going on despite reams of visual detail and passing references to events and things they'd never encountered before.
45 minutes into my theater viewing of TGC, I leaned over my movie-going buddy and asked him if he knew what was going on. He whispered back he was totally lost. Two years and 45 minutes later I asked him the same question during Watchmen. He said he was following but didn't understand a lot of what was going on.
It was then I knew this movie would have a loyal fan base but the broader public reception would be tepid.