Watchmen…
Watchmen is very good. But it is not amazing or earth shattering. The film has a couple of real problems, problems that the source material didn’t have.
A few of the characters in the film felt very stiff and I never warmed up to them like I did in comic. Some of that is due to poor/miscast performances and others due to the fact that cramming so much character development for so many in such a short amount of time is just incredibly hard to do. Perhaps if it was a mini series instead of feature film.
Although not all the characters got the short shift, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach was amazing. To be fair I’m somewhat biased since Rorschach is my favorite character from the series, but regardless Haley’s work in the film is the best of the cast. Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson each portrayed their characters extremely well.
The next problem is the plot. The filmmakers were incredibly faithful to the source comics, with the exception of two very important areas, the murder of the comedian and the ending.
The murder in the book is shown with a much higher level of mystery than it is in the film. No they don’t explicitly show you who killed him, but they might as well. From the body type, height, the way he moved, it was rather obvious who the murderer was, something that was a complete surprise in the book.
And the ending, much has been made of this ending. I didn’t care that they changed the ending, squid or no squid it doesn’t ultimately matter. Replacing it with a nuclear like blasts framed on Dr. Manhattan on the surface seems like a great idea, but after thinking about it for a few days it’s just retarded. Dr. Manhattan is America’s poster boy, if the global destruction is to be blamed on him why would the rest of the world join forces with them? They wouldn’t they would bomb the shit out of the people who couldn’t control their monster. The squid was a simple external antagonist forcing global unity.
Despite all of that I did really enjoy the film. The Dark Knight is still in a class by itself. Had this come out before this recent run of great comic book movies (Dark Knight, Iron Man, etc...) it would have been a crazy spectacle of fanboy love. But the bar is just too high. Especially given the source material which is so deep and complex, makes it hard to shrink it down to a watchable length. I still contend that this would have been better as an HBO mini series, but Snyder packs an awful lot into 160 minutes. Never did I feel that it was a 160 minutes. Can't imagine what the directors cut will be like with a rumored additional 40 minutes of footage.
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