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Back in the mid-90’s, there was some buzz that Terry Gilliam was to helm his own adaptation of this classic graphic novel of the 1980’s.  Famously, Gilliam proclaimed that to be true to the source material, a 12-part mini-series was in order.  Needless to say, no one financed this aforementioned effort.  Cut to two years ago: the great Zack Snyder, fresh off his “victorious debut” with 300 is deemed the brilliant mind capable of turning this complex character drama into a mainstream action movie.

Before I start to really pick apart this film, I must say that I am a huge fan of Alan Moore’s original graphic novel.  It is brilliant, revolutionary, visually stunning, brimming with mind-bending complexity, and above all an absolute joy to read.  I’d like to say that a tremendous amount was lost in its translation, but in reality, the problem is more that so little was lost in translation.  Snyder has proved to us that he fundamentally doesn’t understand the point of adapting source material for the screen.  Rather than creating a film that can stand on its own, he has sowed this 2.5+ hour monstrosity so filled with references to characters and events developed far more fully in the book, that this movie is nearly impossible to follow.  I hear the director’s cut might reconcile this, but at the cost of making the unfortunate viewer sit through an additional hour of previously unused footage.

Watchmen takes place in a universe where superheroes are real.  That concept needs a large amount of explanation.  Snyder gives us a title sequence of “stills” that are meant to bring the viewer past the rise and fall of the superhero (a period of about 40-50 years).  There are a few more allusions to these past events as the movie goes on, but never is the audience specifically told: this is why super heroes are real; this is why their world is different than ours; this is why you should give a damn about what is happening on-screen.  The audience is thrust into a world they can’t possibly understand, almost entirely in medias res.  The effect is an unfortunate one.  Who are these decaying characters that claim to be the superheroes of old, but only spend fleeting time on-screen, with little or no reference made to anything that happened to them prior.  Who can care when one of them dies or cries or lies or has an affair?  We know nothing about these people.  If Snyder didn’t have the screen time to develop characters, then why did he instead opt to stick them into a scene or two, and just assume his audience could surmise that in some way they must be important, even if he has not taken the courtesy to indicate why.  Yes, if you read the book, everything would make sense.  But should reading the source material be a prerequisite to watching the movie?  Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of adapting it in the first place?

Mr. Snyder, you need to make changes, “adaptations” if I might be so bold, if you wish to successfully “adapt” a book for shooting as a movie of any reasonable length.  A literal adaptation could not possibly fit within Hitchcock’s classic rule that the length of a film need by directly proportional to the endurance of a human bladder.  Gilliam understood this when he said it would take 12 hour long parts to do Alan Moore justice.  Snyder would have been better suited to take a cue from Victor Fleming and suitably change the story into that of a self-contained movie, as opposed to an abridgment of an un-adaptable source material.

Few things made this film watchable.  (Here’s a hint: it definitely wasn’t a bizarrely long sex scene, or the soundtrack, which seemed to come from a CD titled “Greatest Hits of Hollywood Soundtracks: 1990-2008.”)  Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, and Patrick Wilson make their characters the only really believable things in a terribly unexplainable world.  These three acted as if even though their histories were never addressed on-screen, they still existed as complex human beings nonetheless.  Everyone else was mediocre, with the exception of a certain Miss Malin Akerman, to whom I attribute a new depth of mediocrity.  Her scenes might have been more believable had they been played by any of our great deceased leading ladies of the 40’s and 50’s (their present condition withstanding).

In conclusion, this is a bad movie.  If you really want to experience Watchmen, put your ticket price towards a copy of the 1987 original.

-Paul Brinnel