The Effort Was Flawless, But the Final Product Was A Letdown

Rating: 6/10 (11 January 2010)

The Alan Moore graphic 1987 novel "The Watchmen" ranks as an icon as it took the comic book genre to leap over hurdles by making it into a literary masterpiece. Almost a year ago, I went to see the movie with high expectations that this was going to live up to Moore's novel. The sad truth it turned out to be less than what I have expected. It's not that it was so bad I demanded my refund, it just didn't live up to the novel, even though a lot of heart was put into it.
In a nutshell, the stuff I liked about the movie is that it carefully recreates nearly 90% of the novel, even to the smallest details. Sure that also includes having the honour's of observing Dr. Manhattan's (Billy Crudup)private parts, but more importantly they nailed at the illustrations to near perfection. The visuals and the sound effects were some of the best I've seen in a long time. The narrative of Dr. Manhattan was surprisingly interesting and witty. The action in the movie is enough to raise a few eyebrows and the action from the movie is accurate in a sense as it's taken from the book and was executed perfectly.
The material that needed improvement was that it times it falls in the category of being to shallow at times. For example in the novel, the threat of Nuclear War is in effect, yet the frightening intensity and fear is featured in the novel, but in the movie the intensity is not there. The civilians in the novel are in mass-panic and the paranoia that's manifesting in the lives of these people give it's readers the same intensity as well. But in the movie, it doesn't happen. The only characters that are scared are the superheroes and the government officials. This results in a lack-luster effort by the production because a big chunk of the plot from the novel is missing almost to the brink of being pointless. With this deadly war coming soon to a city near you, you can't just depend on an all-tiring scene where the President sits on their asses in a war room to give an emergency address across the nation. With the war on hand they're fighting to stay alive and being able to see it ourselves, we never get to feel for the civilians because we're focusing more on the war room and less on the fight.
The acting was in the most of it pretty droll because the intensity and the emotions in the character are very underused. The one who stood above average was the Jackie Earl Haley's character of Rorschach who was very convincing, but the characters overall don't stand out like they did in Iron Man. The portrayal of Richard Nixon is badly caricatured and the soundtrack is just as equally degrading. Who thought it would be funny to include the "hallelujah" song during the sex scene? Whatever! Silly to put goofy songs during tense moments is enough to make anyone cringe. Even the funeral scenes are looked as a joke, what gives? No respect for the dead?
Okay it's impossible to take every detail in the book and cram in all the scenes, that I understand. Sure it was very good physically and stylistically, but I was a bit disappointed with the finished product. To those who admire the work of Alan Moore it's worthy of at least one watch, but there would not be a need to see it more than that. It's a good action movie, but not counting for other tastes. The movie has missed a lot and after we're finished watching the movie we might be able to know what was missing from the novel.