unbelievable!!! No really, It's awesome!!!

Rating: 9/10 (11 March 2009)

The comedian is a crime fighting superhero of the mould of Batman or Green Arrow, a mere mortal with exceptional fighting abilities, he is also about to meet his match. As his door is beaten down he is assaulted by an attacker who seems to know and counter all of his best moves, and they are pretty sweet. However after a 30 storey journey straight down to the street level the comedian is no more. This is the catalyst that drives the barely human Rorshach into action to revisit the members of his old team and try and figure out if this marks the start of an attack on all his old team members from the defunct superhero team "Watchmen".
Many films these days are over-hyped, dumbed-down or are turned into incomprehensible garbage, and while I heaped praise on "Batman Begins" my feelings on the "Dark Knight" are well known. Unlike Dark Knight, this hasn't been hyped to hell, nobody died before it came out so people's views aren't clouded by sympathy, and, unlike Dark Knight, I didn't really like the comic book. Yes, you heard right, I was not a fan of "Watchmen". Whilst the writing was okay (I preferred Moore's other works like "Halo Jones") the artwork was quite static and I found that lack of dynamism off-putting (Gibbons women look like men in drag!)
Add to the that the fact that the film had been branded "Unfilmable" due to the size of the original text, and due to the persnickety nature of the audience, it was likely that the books fans would have a go at the film for being not enough like the graphic novel or too much like the graphic novel and you've got a tight rope it is virtually impossible for the director, Zack Snyder, to navigate successfully.
So let's get to the guts of it. Is "Watchmen" any good.
If I was Alan Moore I'd start dancing in the street right about now. "Watchmen" the movie takes the original ideas, too grounded in a desire to be real in the novel, and lets them take flight on the big screen. The action sequences are awesome, with a great blend of the realistic consequences of violence, which Moore wanted in the original text, mixed with dynamic cinematic editing and framing to make them exciting to watch. Much of the dialogue and the best cinematic shots are taken directly from the source, but look so much better on the big screen. It was like the ideas in the comic-book, belonged here all the time, but on the page, they were too restricted, (the dialogue sounding especially good from the mouths of these character actors.)
Perhaps the masterstroke here though is with the no-star cast we have no baggage from previous roles, no "oh, that's George Clooney as Rorsharch" or "Russell Crowe as Nite Owl", etc. You accept the actors because nothing tells you that you are watching a movie, you are simply watching a huge story unfold before your eyes.
I went to see this with a friend who nothing of the comic book and he loved it, I knew the original source but was not particularly a fan, and loved it. Obviously there are a few minor changes (In a way the big change is actually cleverer device than what happens in the original story!) but these were of the kind comparative to the subtle changes in Shawshank, nothing worth writing home about.
Is it the greatest comic book adaptation of all time? I don't know, but it was a brave move by the studio and a ballsy piece of direction by Zack Snyder that has put this hype-played-down, superhuman-visual-treat in cinemas for the world to enjoy.
I hope you do, as I know I will again.
Joyous.
Nuff said!