GRcade

Not sure what to think because the book was too fresh in the mind. I could recognise most of the places where the dialogue was a straight quote, and then the bits that changed were just as obvious (even down to dialogue). This is my fault, mind, not the film's.

The style was what I found most jarring. In some places it was great, and I could instantly tell that each scene in the film tried to recreate one of the frames from the comic, almost detail for detail. In some ways it felt like they tried to force this, or force some of the lines, and the slow-mo fetish didn't help. In a way it seemed like it was used to mask a lack of creativity, in a fashion not too dissimilar to Bay's 3-second-epilepsy-shot fetish in Transformers where you spend 5 minutes watching absolutely nothing at all, because it changes too fast to make any sense.

I've no complaints about the plot except that the big MacGuffin in the comic was put on the sideline in the film. The fear of a world war 3 was quite oppressive in print because it featured so heavily. In this it's relegated to almost passing mention in favour of going for Rorschach's mask killer conspiracy. I agree that the 'lesser evil to undo all greater evils' event was visually spectacular but not keeping in theme with the original sentiment.

Which is probably my single greatest gripe about what otherwise would be a brilliant film. The rest is mere nitpicking and is easy to gloss over, but the film Watchmen was only about the guys in costume. The book, while they were the main characters, didn't just document their journey and relationships but New York's descent into chaos as the threat of armageddon drew nearer. You had the parallel stories intertwined between issues. The film gets rid of all but the masked adventurer bit.

The change to falsely vilifying Dr Manhattan was a good one. Watchmen, to me, is absurd enough as it is without some daft idea of a fabricated alien invasion. Teleporting reactor overloads all over the world just so they could explode and wipe away all traces of human life was a cop out. Removes the atrocity element. Even the Hiroshima references were subdued.

Good film though. I'd give it 8/10 for being entertaining and rather unique as far as these things go. It would've been a 9 or a 10 if they made their mind up about doing an adaptation or an interpretation instead of mixing it. Rorschach was always going to steal the show, too.

*the only things that caught me was the change to Rorschach's origins, the manner of the death of the first of Big Figure's henchmen and Dan punching Veidt at the end, and in the final analysis... none was terribly out of place - they fit the film, even if they weren't straight from the source.

The ending didn't quite make as much sense as a giant strawberry float off squid, Veidt was just wrong, as was the sex scene and the constant musical references.

However, Dr M. was spot on, and his flashback scene was easily the highlight of the film. The only thing missing was him knowing he'd get bored of the photograph and dropping it at his feet and walking away, but oh well.

In the sense that Dr Manhattan is just as alien to humans as a gigantic squid was, I don't think it was that change that spoiled things a little.

I think it made Veidt look a little simplistic though. There was none of the stuff about kidnapping the world's greatest artistic talents to help create something so mind-blowingly twisted it'd literally scare people to death and leave survivors emotionally destroyed. In which case you could say Veidt didn't just think aliens would be a common enemy - he could associate insanity with it. The initial blast had to have fall out. It was mentioned how people were still being admitted to hospital, thinking their babies were eating them from the inside.

The film lost that, though, I think. And I guess you could blame 9/11 for making Americans in particular so selectively sensitive to such matters. Y'know, it's fine to show dogs eating six year old girls; and it's fine to glorify Vietnam (studio CEOs wanting to make America look successful, fnar); but the destruction of New York and the atrocities of it? Nah, too close to the bone.

There was also Dr Manhattan's last remark to Veidt, "it never ends." Which was there to say that Veidt's plan was still far too short sighted and not even he was smart enough to avoid that. I guess they compensated by showing his despair as Dan and Laurie leave though.

Snyder uses gratuitous violence the whole way through the film yet pulls the punch when it comes to the one scene where violence is the most needed. I understand that the 9/11 comparisons would eventually come, but considering how brave the producers and studios were in making an R-rated comicbook movie, you think they could have pushed through and shown the real consequences of Veidt's plan.