The big question has always been whether the classic, 12-issue comic book series Watchmen could be successfully adapted into a movie. It’s a daunting task for sure, given how textured and complex the story is, and all the themes running through it.
This movie adaption is definitely faithful to the original story, it looks just like the comic, and there are some truly inspired moments. The opening montage is great, and
the best character in the comic–Rorschach–is by the far the best chaThe big question has always been whether the classic, 12-issue comic book series Watchmen could be successfully adapted into a movie. It’s a daunting task for sure, given how textured and complex the story is, and all the themes running through it.
This movie adaption is definitely faithful to the original story, it looks just like the comic, and there are some truly inspired moments. The opening montage is great, and
the best character in the comic–Rorschach–is by the far the best character in the movie. Night Owl is also particularly good. There’s a great prison sequence, and some of the visuals are stunning.
The director deserves all the credit in the world for finally bringing Watchmen to the screen in this incredibly ambitious experiment. But overall I found Watchmen to be a long, slow, dreary, humorless, poorly acted mess that simply doesn’t work well as a movie. At large, the movie lacks the comic’s charm. Many of the other main characters fall flat–and some dreadfully so–while many of the smaller, supporting roles are just awful. The script is another problem. Even though it’s taken almost verbatim from the comic, the words that read so amazing on the page don’t translate to the screen. They’re stiff and dull so that I almost always felt I was watching something fake. The sets were like that, too.
Even at 2 hours, 40 minutes, Watchmen may have been helped be being longer. There were too many quick scenes–trying to jam in so much information–that the plot was hard to follow, each scene seeming incomplete. The depth of the plot really needed more time to breathe, which was just an inherent problem from the beginning.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of individual pieces to like about this movie, and it’s a crazy experiment for sure, with some truly great moment. There are certain scenes, and a few performances, that I’ll always want to go back to. But as a stand-alone movie, Watchmen doesn’t hold together well. In the director’s noble quest to stay faithful to the comic, he seemed to forget that he was making a movie that has to work on it’s own merits. In all fairness, it was a very difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, it just didn’t all come together.
