Watchmen

Let's approach this as a film, not as an adaptation. This is, I believe, the
best superhero movie yet. This is, however, sadly, no major claim. There's
never been a superhero film that's been better than "excellent, but flawed" and
this is no exception.

I'd start by saying that the flaws are not to be found in the acting. I am, I
believe, completely happy with every performance throughout. With a cast of
essentially unknowns (Billy Crudup is the most well known as That Guy in That
Thing I Saw One Time), they merge into their roles in a way that you can't
imagine a Big Movie Star doing. Full marks on that score - Jackie Earl Haley
gets top marks as Rorschach. In that his task is to make a character who is
essentially a right wing sociopath who never washes, and make you admire him
and feel for him. His big scene comes right at the end, and for me, it would
make or break the movie; it makes it.

Effects, again, marvellous. With exception of the makeup they stuck on the guy
playing Nixon, that is. But ignoring that, it's woo yay explosions, fight
scenes, and whizzy effects from start to finish.

The problems are two. First, direction. I feel like a heel for bringing it up,
but just maybe Zack Snyder wasn't up to this. Mistake me not, he deserves a
medal for what he *did* do, which was to fight the studios in a running battle
to make the film as faithful to the source as possible, but when push comes to
shove, the direction is somehow flat and literal.

Second, the script. In places, it's like Watchmen - Slow Learner's Edition. I
don't expect to have the plot explained to me so much. This is an intelligent
film, there's no need to spell so much out. Second, this is a two and a half
hour braindump. If I may compare to the original just this once, that was
twelve issues of 22 pages each, plus back material. Each designed by Alan Moore
to be digested over the course of a month, ready for the next issue. Compress
that into two and a half hours and inject it into the forebrain, and it kind of
hurts. So we're kind of left with this uncomfortable paradox of there a) being
too much cut out and b) being too much left in. I don't know that this could
have been avoided. So, rollercoaster ride from start to finish, when maybe you
want to sit and think about what you saw.