"Do you like snuff-porn movies, Jimmy?"

Rating: 1/10 (1 August 2009)

Alan Moore had his name removed from this obscene putrescence and it's easy to guess why. Whereas Moore wrote a thoughtful genre piece on what could happen to the US if Republican hawks stayed in power past Vietnam and as a cautionary tale against the coming fascism of Bush and company, the movie version is simply a snuff-porn version of "The Days of Our Lives" made all the more unwatchable in that it compresses the events of 40 years in a 3 hour movie.
I never read Moore's graphic novel out of contempt for American so-called intellectuals who really believe, in their current state of illiteracy, that their best works of fiction can really come from comic-books, even when they are well-intentioned and well thought-out comic-books with pretty pictures. I should have also refused to see another film by the makers of "300". Their only inspirations are video games, the adolescent revenge scenarios of the WWE, regular pornography, torture pornography, snuff pornography and, of course, comic-book violence. The level of insistent, in-your-face, detailed, lingering as well as explosive, sickeningly "imaginative" mayhem in this opus makes "The Dark Knight" look like "The Adventures of Tintin". The only factor that contributes to keeping the gag reflex under reasonable control is that the photography is so murky at times as to be almost undecipherable on DVD, even on a state-of-the-art monitor working in full-blown torch mode.
The film is also aesthetically and structurally unbalanced. I won't even mention the asinine, cliché-ridden, wince-inducing dialog, which is worthy of a doctoral thesis on the dumbing-down of America or the sleep-inducing blue-green colour scheme, which is the signature of all pretentious failed cinematic masterpieces of the last decade. But the idea of mixing all that shtupping and dismemberment with protest and art songs of the sixties, seventies and eighties is simply revolting. I will never be able to listen to those songs again without feeling something of our collective past has been desecrated forever. The film is composed of two unequal parts: (1) one hour and forty-five minutes of incomprehensible exposition where the spectator is asked to memorize the back-stories, names, surnames, aliases, murderous habits and hidden identities of a dozen or so totally despicable non-entities who don't seem to have any superpowers (except for Dr. Manhattan's freakish nature and the others' ability to kill on demand) and (2) one hour (minus interminable credits) of full-blown but equally incomprehensible and disgustingly as well as gratuitously graphic "action". The film's moral is that America has lost its moral compass and its soul. The fact that this film was made at all and that it was a relative success in the US - a success that will probably open the door to even more egregious and grandiose atrocities - is ample proof of that demoralizing fact.
P.S.: The saccharine grafted-on ending straight out of "The Waltons" doesn't help matters much. There is still no one to cheer for and the whodunit taking up two hours of that film is never satisfactorily resolved.