Watchmen (2009)

As a voracious reader and a fan of the source material which was Watchmen, the greatest comic book (and I do mean comic book, not graphic novel) to gain critical and commercial success, I was rearing to go on this adaptation. I had already heard a bleak prognosis for this film, but I still wasn't disappointed in too many ways. Zack Snyder, who is really most famous for visually compromised films such as 300 and Sucker Punch, took on Watchmen with a lot more care than I can give credit for. He didn't write the script, but you can tell he had a vital hand in the production, costuming, and the direction reaks of him. If I had to say Watchmen suffers from anything it is its faithless keeping with the novel. Every backstory of the heroes, every moment of the plot that actually needs telling, was included in this. It's nothing but a faithless adaptation in so many ways and really makes the characters pop onscreen. What's bad about being faithless, is that it takes almost an hour and a half to fit every backstory into the film and still you have an entire evil scheme to unearth along the way. Not just that but the decidedly gritty and morose tone of the book seems lost among the superhero bullshit that inevitably comes with big budget films. The violence in Watchmen wasn't there to entertain the reader, but show the state of human nature and the evils of society. Here it's almost glorified ad nauseum, especially that of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II. Plus, the ending is completely changed, probably to satiate a wide audience, and some key scenes are warped, which I don't truly care about but it makes no sense to change them. The casting was decent, especially that of Rorschach, The Comedian, and Dan Dreiberg. Some choices annoyed or even irritated me, but every person chosen was great as their alter ego and didn't take away anything...well, maybe the sex scene did as it was so intentionally graphic that I openly laughed at the absurdity. Really, it's more funny than anything, and probably that's not a positive in lieu of the circumstances. It was also unmercifully long and drawn out with the backstories taking up a good chunk of the film, which I understand because you need that buildup for the characters; to feel for them to the bitter end, but because they changed the ending and the true poignancy of a hero's sacrifice, it feels hollow. Much of this is hollow to some extent since some very important and eye grabbing visual choices of the book weren't included. The writer of the book, Alan Moore, has said that Watchmen is unfilmmable and won't watch the adaptation. I suppose I don't wholeheartedly agree with that, but if you're going to do Watchmen, you have to have more than just a moody visual milieu and intense violence. You must think about questioning your entire moral code, and what would happen if you lost it. I wish the film had addressed the actual message behind this instead of making it commercial. There was just too much compromise with this and not enough understanding, and that saddens me.