Movie Review: Watchmen
March 17, 2009 (8:57 PM) ( link )

I saw the Watchmen movie the other night. It was pretty entertaining. As others have noted, the movie essentially treats the original book as a storyboard and so slavishly reproduces many of Moore and Gibbons's original frames. Since the graphic novel had plenty of cinematic flair, this fidelity is mostly a good idea, although the film accordingly has very little power that isn't derivative of the original work's (with the exception of Jackie Earle Haley's excellent performance as Rorschach). In addition, some scenes suffer from the translation to the screen: Dreiberg's "What happened to the American dream?" sounds plaintive on the page but kind of lame in the movie; Dr. Manhattan's excursion to Mars seems really random (in the silence following his first appearance there, somebody in the theater audibly muttered: "What the f---?!"); and don't even get me started on the campy and awkwardly explicit sex scene.

The director, Zack Snyder, departs in only two significant ways from the graphic novel. The first is the ending, which I thought worked better than the book's. The second is a rather significant upgrade in violence. Dan and Laurie don't just fight off the knotheads, they break bones and push the jagged edges through skin; instead of letting a kidnapper burn offstage, Rorschach drives a cleaver into his skull; and Big Figure saws off his henchman's arms rather than simply breaking his neck. Snyder films these events (and more) in all of their blood-spattering glory, often in slow motion. It's disgusting -- and unnecessary.