As Bad as the Comic...

Rating: 3/10 (8 March 2009)

This movie, like the comic, takes every wholesome and positive things about the superhero genre of comics and tosses it aside. Alan Moore must have felt that he was brilliant when he borrowed the wholesome characters from the Charlton Comics line. He renamed them and turned them into murderers, rapists, tramps, and sociopaths. Like a lot of his work, he uses pop culture references and mocks them. In this case it is superheroes. Rather than try to intelligently incorporate the positive ideals and inspiration that superheroes bring to the reader, he set out instead to degrade and mock the optimism. He does this while retaining everything geeky and nerd-like in the superhero genre of writing.
Visually this movie deserves an 8. The acting deserves an 8. The story however is so bad that it completely negates all the hard work done to make it look good on screen. The story alone drags my rating down to a 3. This movie suffers from one big problem that can be found in other bad movies... flashbacks within flashbacks. If these events are relevant, start the story with them. If they are not, put them on them cutting room floor. Dragging the viewer through a mystery, then tossing in a back story to justify it, is not good writing in my opinion. It's distracting. It muddles the relevance of the plot. It just makes me not care about the characters. The only character remotely interesting was Dr. Manhattan. Watching full nude scenes with him throughout the movie was just annoying. It was unnecessary and another reason not to care about a character. I was glad when this movie was over. It's a shame there was no nuclear holocaust to put the characters in the film to rest.