Brilliant movie, but not on par with the graphic novel

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2012)

Watchmen is one of those films that splits the audience into those who have read the novel before seeing the movie and hated it and those who watched the movie before reading the novel and loved it. To be fair, this is very simplified, seeing as there are people who didn't read the novel and still hated it and of course there's the other way around, but there's still a big mixed opinion.
At first I was very sceptical towards this movie, because I had read the novel and was (of course) absolutely blown away by it like everyone else. When I first watched this movie I was speechless at how great Snyder enacts the intro and the simply breathtaking opening credits while the perfectly fitting "The Times they are A-Changin'" is playing in the background. Even when I'm writing about it now, I still get goosebumps and that's a testament for a great film. I consider this one of the greatest, if not THE greatest opening in a movie of all time. I was thinking to myself that this would just become better and better the longer it plays and would ultimately become one of my all time favorites. Sadly at the end it didn't hold up enough for me.
But first let's take a look at the cast. Here, almost everyone matches perfectly. Either Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan or Billy Crudup, they all do their parts perfectly and look like their counterparts from the novel, but the best one of them all hast to be Jackie Earle Haley. He plays the role of Rorschach so convincingly that you just can't take your eyes off of him. The first time watching I was like "This IS Rorschach". His looks, his monotone voice, just everything about him fits brilliantly. There's only one real miscast in this film and that's Matthew Goode. Don't get me wrong his acting isn't half bad and I guess he's not that bad of an actor in general, but he seemed more like a teacher's pet who just graduated from high school to me and not like the smartest person in the world who can overwhelm Rorschach with his left little finger while catching a bullet with his right hand.
The graphic novel is often considered to be Alan Moore's masterpiece and is even on the list of Time Magazines 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, so if you haven't read it, you can imagine how much depth rests within this work of art. That's the reason why many people to this day consider it to be not screenable, but in my opinion Snyder proved them wrong. I think Eames from Inception said it best: "It's perfectly possible, it's just bloody difficult!", that describes the whole movie for me. It's a great movie in its own right, but it just isn't on par with the source material. For example, they left many supposedly unimportant things out of the movie, which however contribute much to the atmosphere of the comic book, but to give the movie some credit, there are some things that are treated better than in the novel. Like the overall ending in the Antarctic. I really didn't enjoy the rushed paste in the novel, it all seemed a little half assed (If you read the novel, I think you know what I'm talking about.). Here, they altered this part to the better, while still managing to keep the quintessence from the book.
-SPOILER COMING UP- Also, they changed the whole master plan by Ozymandias. I have to say that I don't really know how to feel about this, because on the one hand, it is a really big alteration from the source material, but on the other hand, I know that they couldn't use the "alien-plan", because that would have required to put the back story of the designing of the "alien" into the movie and that, firstly would have been extremely hard to pull off without making it a confusing mess and secondly it would have made the movie too long and that's most certainly also the reason for them leaving out such scenes like the killing of Hollis Mason, the first Rorschach bar scene or every scene of the regular people at the newsstand. -SPOILER OVER-
One thing that I just HAVE to mention, is the Action. Holy f*****g s**t this is motherf*****g awesome. Snyder already proved that he is great in doing action scenes with Dawn of the Dead and 300, but in Watchmen he takes it to a hole new level. You can literally feel every punch and kick, every bullet and hatchet, it's just beautiful. The camera-work is great too, you really feel drawn directly into the action. There's also a lot of slow motion, but never too much for you to get annoyed, or to make the action become ridiculous. It's just some of the greatest action scenes you will ever see in a motion picture and trust me that's no exaggeration.
After this big praise comes a little nitpicking, the soundtrack. I've already mentioned the ingenious use of Bob Dylan in the opening credits above, but then there's tracks like the clumsy use of "99 Luftballons" which came out of nowhere and went out of nowhere and seemed to only fur fill the purpose of getting across to the audience that this movie's set in the 80's, or the almost infamous use of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen during a sex scene. What the hell is up with that?
All in all it was a great movie and I neither find it to be a masterpiece nor a total bomb, but it really is an incredible comic adaptation. Maybe not on the same level as the novel, but that's something very hard to pull off, seeing as how acclaimed it is. You should definitely check it out and find out on which side you're gonna be...