A Valiant Effort, But Ultimately a Failed One

Rating: 5/10 (28 March 2012)

This may be the most literal film adaptation of a print property we'll ever see, but that alone can't make it half as successful as it could have been. Having grown up with the trade paperback by my bedside, a holy grail of sorts for comic book fanatics, it's almost a religious experience to see these themes, characters and visuals represented so loyally on the big screen. As he did with 300, Zac Snyder has absolutely nailed the look and feel of the comics, breathtakingly, but underneath that dazzling surface is a terrible lack of soul, conviction and character. With the exception of Jackie Earl Haley, who is absolutely magnificent as the mentally teetering vigilante Rorschach, this is a large collection of miscast characters which never really seem to buy into what they're saying or doing. The words are right, ripped line-for-line from the bubbles and narrative boxes of the comics, and of course everyone looks great, but bland inflections, bad interpretations and a hectic, compressed timeframe strip away the power of the plot's weightiest moments. In a way it's TOO loyal, as it's surprisingly the one major moment that steps away from the guiding hands of the source material - a significant tweak to the story's conclusion - that works the best. Snyder was ambitious to tackle such a booby-trapped property, and to do so with such a passionate love for its roots is admirable, but there's a reason it was dubbed unfilmable for so many years. There's so much going on at any given moment that even the most familiar reader runs the risk of being bucked, and even at three hours, a large portion of the story is left on the cutting room floor. And for Watchmen, those seemingly-dispensable character moments are every bit as important as the heaviest plot developments.