A Review of Watchmen

Before I start this review, I thought I would mention, for the three people that don’t already know this about me, that I am a huge comic book fan. I’ve been reading them for most of my life, and I love them. I first read Watchmen when I was in high school, and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it was the most amazing thing ever. Then I read it again when I was older and I loved it. There’s a cinematic quality about Watchmen the book that is fairly common in comics now but that I’m sure was astounding at the time of the release of the series. I look at reading Watchmen now like watching Citizen Kane now: you have to consider the time period in which the work was created in order to fully appreciate how ahead of its time it was.

So let’s talk about Watchmen the movie. As a movie adaptation that remains faithful to the original book, it was amazing. After years of missteps and averted disasters, and after master filmmaker Terry Gilliam called Watchmen the book unfilmable, director Zack Snyder has created a near-perfect Watchmen film. Shots were framed to exactly match panels of Dave Gibbons’s nine-panel grid, and dialogue was lifted directly from Alan Moore’s scripts. I expected this of Snyder, though, after 300 came out and was extremely faithful to its source material (so I’ve been told, as I’ve never seen that nor do I particularly care to). Snyder is a director who respects his source material, and who adheres to it almost fanatically, and that respect shone through on the screen. There were aspects of the book that had to be removed for the sake of time, but overall Snyder managed to pack so much story into just under three hours that I more or less forgave him for it. My favorite part of the film was probably the opening credits, which are spectacular in their simplicity. You can watch them in their entirety here. Each of the snapshots shown in the credits has a full story behind it, but knowing that full story isn't essential to understanding the movie. Despite the parts of the book that were left out, watching Watchmen the movie was like watching the comic book come to life.

So why did I leave the theatre with such an empty feeling?

Maybe it’s because, where Watchmen succeeds as an adaptation of a graphic novel, it fails as a movie. Watchmen the book was slow. There’s not a lot of action in the book. It’s mainly about character development and the relationships between them. Therefore, there’s not a lot of action in the movie. Unfortunately, though, a lot of the wonderful character development that makes the book so enjoyable is lost in the translation to the screen because of time limitations. As a result, I had a hard time relating to any of the characters in the movie, which is strange, since I already had a relationship with them as a result of having read the comic.

When the film ended, I just sat there. I had no idea what to say. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but this time I really wanted to have something to say. The story of the film was exactly the same as that of the book, but I didn’t think it had the same impact on the screen as it does in the book because I didn’t feel any attachment to any of the characters. The performances were all very good, save for that of the actor playing Ozymandias, who couldn’t seem to decide if he wanted his character to have an accent or not and so decided to have it both ways, which was distracting, especially during Ozy’s monologues towards the end of the film. The film was very well made. It was well-acted and well-shot. The choices of music were brilliant. And yet I still felt like it was all a little flat. I needed to connect to the characters, and I could not. I found them fascinating, but not relatable. I go to the movies because I want to feel something, and I didn’t feel anything when Watchmen ended.

All of that said, I’m still extremely conflicted about the whole thing. I thought that writing down my thoughts would help me to sort them out, and it did, to a degree, but I still don’t know what conclusion to come to. I think I enjoyed the movie. I really do. But I think I enjoyed it mainly because of what a faithful adaptation of the book it was and because of how well-made it was, not because any of the characters were engaging or because of the pace of the story. As a book, Watchmen is still a masterpiece. As a movie, Watchmen reaches for the stars but falls just a little short.