Oh so very long ago, I rushed through my backlog of film reviews so I could put up my review of Watchmen in a timely manner. I was quite excited for this -- one of those, "oh my god, I can't believe it's actually happening" moments. For people (meaning geeky guys) of a certain age (meaning middle-aged), the publication of Watchmen was one of those great watershed moments. I'm not sure what I could compare it with to let kids understand just how big of a deal this was. The closest I can figure is if twenty years from now, they decided to make a movie version of Lost. Of course, I'm assuming that kids watch Lost. How about if they canceled Family Guy and then made a movie version twenty years later? Would that work?
Regardless, suffice it to say that I was all geeked out and perhaps it was my high level of enthusiasm that led to such painful disappointment. The Mini-Ster and the J (this was a big-time, get together featuring the entire cast of characters and then some), both of whom were unfamiliar with the comic book, thought the movie perfectly adequate. Amigo #1, however, was just as disappointed as myself and, not coincidentally, he's also a fan of the original comic book.
Part of the problem -- maybe the biggest problem -- is that the film is too faithful to its source material. It doesn't fully take into consideration that different genres require vastly different narrative techniques. The Watchmen comic books were serialized -- that is, it's not a single graphic novel but a series of comic books published monthly (as most comic books are). There's an inherently episodic element to the way the narrative unfolds. By following this too closely, Zack Snyder's film adaptation lacks any sense of flow and coherence.
The other problem -- and this one to me is huge -- is that there are certain conventions that just can't be translated. The whole thing that made Watchmen special was that it tried to picture "normal" people as superheroes. While these guys could certainly fight well, they were still just people. During a key fight scene in the film, however, these guys seemed to have super powers akin to what you would see in The Matrix.
I'm sure I could sit here and nitpick at the 300 reasons why this film sucked (yeah, that's right, I said 300) ... and somewhere on the top ten would be the very simple fact that Malin Akerman cannot act to save her life. She's pathetically bad and only helps make a difficult to stomach film even more annoying and painful. But, like I said, I'm not going to nitpick. Perhaps a few years from now, I'll rent this on DVD and I'll have a change of heart but I highly doubt it.
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