watchmen review

From the start of the Watchmen cult, film people knew two things about the comic book: (1) that it simply had to be made into a movie and (2) that it couldn't.

An epic superhero saga, spanning 45 years, with six major characters who all sport double identities and crucial, intertwined back-stories, does not lend itself to the narrative turbo-thrust of a standard action film. Indeed, the superest hero of the bunch — Dr. Manhattan, once known as Jon Osterman — is not an action hero; he's a passive one, a contemplative godhead, a sinewy blue nude Buddha, emotionally removed from the comic's central whodunit quest: Who killed Eddie Blake? A.k.a. the Comedian.

Complicating this is the possessiveness felt by hardcore Watchmaniacs, who believe that any change is an act of treason. When director Zack Snyder showed clips of the movie last fall to an audience of rapt but wary votaries, one portly fellow told him, "On behalf of the obese-obsessive demographic, I want your assurance that the ending does not puss out." Such is the snakebite of hype, especially for a project with such outsize expectations. The film, budgeted at $100 million and the object of a rights wrangle between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, has received less than rapturous early reviews. In his Hollywood Reporter critique, Kirk Honeycutt predicted that the film would be "the first real flop of 2009."

That's the dilemma the director faced: to risk disappointing both the fan base (for diverting from the sacred text) and the agnostic mass audience (for being a confusing, unsatisfying movie experience). Snyder — who had a big hit two years ago with 300, and who took Watchmen on after interesting auteurs from Terry Gilliam in the '80s to Paul Greengrass a few years ago fell out — went with the fan base. He worked from a script written in 2001 by David Hayter, and filigreed by Alex Tse, that was as close to the original as a movie could be. The best and worst thing to say about the Watchmen film is that, if you read the book, the movie you made in your head probably looked a lot like this.