Watchmen

The most celebrated graphic novel of all-time, is that true?  Was this officially measured or are we just assuming that if you were to rank the level of celebration Watchmen would be the victor?  I guess that is not important because it is just nice to have a film version of such a groundbreaking work. 

I avoided rereading Watchmen before the release of the film version because I had no desire to nitpick while sitting in the theater.  Zach Snyder has made visually stunning movies in his short career so I wanted to judge his work for what it is not for what I expected it to be.  Watchmen was a slick movie with a handful of memorable scenes.  Jackie Earle Haley was able to take one of the greatest comic book characters ever, Rorschach, and bring him completely to life.  He was responsible for so many great moments, “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me”, “give me back my face”, his final scene, it was just an unreal performance.  Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson were also fantastic as The Comedian and Nite Owl respectively.  In fact I have nothing really negative to say about the rest of the cast, well, I would have preferred a more memorable Veidt but jeez the cast of characters were deep and you can’t expect a 100% success rate.

The main knocks I have about Watchmen were the labyrinth-like storyline and length.  Look, I read the book and still felt lost a couple of times nothing serious just motivations are never all that clear when it came to the “villains”.  As for the length, it wasn’t boring but anything pushing 3 hours feels like its been 3 hours.  Yet even at the super-sized length character arcs were just left on the editing room floor.  Nothing I just wrote about are killers, just blemishes preventing another The Dark Knight.

For something deemed unfilmable, Watchmen was indeed filmable.  In fact they filmed and released it to the masses.  It was a strong effort that just missed the mark.

8 our of 10