With their best effort, an incoherent mess

Rating: 5/10 (7 March 2009)

From a non-Watchmen fan point of view, I thought the movie bombed. My 7 other friends and I had all kinds of complains but we all agreed that it had not been a good time. The theater was deafly quiet when credits rolled.
For my part, I thought the whole movie was very inconsistent and disjointed. You have literally 3 distinct flavors of movie blended into one: John with his god-like superpower that inspires wonder and mysteriousness; Rorschach with his Sin-City like action and narration; and The Comedian, Dan & Lori with their good old beat-them-up actions kind of like the Batman (but to much lesser cinematography effect). It's unfortunate that I don't believe they belong to the same story very well, and the short amount of time allowed for this movie makes it even more suffocating as we're forced to just see a wee bit of each of them.
I disliked the story on the basis that it does not do these heroes justice. It appears the fans enjoyed them as they are true to the original. I ask what is the point of sticking to the original when you only have 2.45 hours. If there is no entertainment value and if the heroes don't shine on the screen, then why bother in the first place? There are more than one place in the movie where the story takes some very amateurish turns - like after the two lovebirds had their fun and decided, hey maybe we should go save Rorschach... with such lack of dramatic display. There were so many lousy scenes like this, that I eventually just lost interests in it and just wanted it to end.
As for the 'dark and intelligent' remark. It is unfortunate but compared to the other dark, complex and intelligent superhero movies that came out over the past few years, Watchmen doesn't look all that more special in any way. Maybe it would, but a lot has been lost in the delivery.
With the lack of a distinct flavor (a motif if you may say), the lack of an interesting story and failing on its own highlight of story, this movie really failed to deliver for me. It could have been a lot better.