Read the Watchmen, rather than watching them

Rating: 5/10 (6 March 2009)

I don't know maybe after twenty some years Alan Moore was right all along, Watchmen is unfilmable. It isn't to the fault of this film which is essentially a faithful and good intentioned adaptation of the story. Maybe in all his eccentricities Alan Moore was on to something. A comic book is meant to be read and not projected in front of you. Watchmen works best as a graphic novel to sit down and read and wrap your mind around. The Superhero film can be good even a masterpiece as Christopher Nolan showed us last year but the comic book film well that may be a different story, particularly when we are adapting the Citizen Kane of comic books...
Zack Snyder is a director who I think has tremendous potential. If I were a producer at Warner Bros. he would have been my go to guy to direct Watchmen as well. For his part the film looks beautiful and has scenes that look like they were taken from frames of the original Watchmen novel. Snyder is not to blame for Watchmen's mediocrity, if anything he makes the film the least bit worthy of a view. The problem with Watchmen lies in it's screenplay which is faithful to the story but not to the spirit.
A word for word adaptation of Watchmen would have been impossible, essentially the meat of the story is still there. The dialogue that had so much meaning in the comic doesn't have any here. I don't know if it is because of the acting or the screenplay, but the context that Moore intended doesn't come across to the viewer. It really is disappointing because Watchmen was a thinking man's comic book. Manhattan's monologue on Mars is essentially unchanged but it doesn't engage the viewer like it does the reader.The characters are there but they aren't fleshed out and we don't develop relationships with them despite some very strong performances. Crudup is actually quite good as Manhattan, but I wasn't engaged or filled with awe despite the fact that the CGI is incredible. Watchmen is a grand story with operatic scale but in the context of the comic book, the subtle details are all gone in film form. Watchmen is a story where you need the big picture to make it work and for the sake of making Watchmen a motion picture these details are there but they are passed over before we can comprehend them. The political satire, the philosophical debates, and the commentary are all but absent. What we get is the surface or the indication that they were once there. I saw Watchmen with my sister who has never read the novel, she was checking her watch the entire film. It is simply is very different in motion picture form despite being the same.
In these times of economic uncertainty I forked over nearly forty bucks to see Watchman with tickets and drinks included. To prepare myself for the film I bought a twenty dollar reprint of the comic. Do yourself a favor and buy the book and then rent the movie at a more reasonable price.