thomas4cinema

One among a group of former costumed self-declared super-heroes, called The Commedian, is found killed. His former Watchmen colleagues, triggered by Dr Rohrschach’s suspicion that the death was murder directed at the whole group, follow the leads linking their hero past with their mostly blunt present. Turns out the suspicion is correct, and they discover a machinery that is working towards destroying or saving the world – or both at the same time.

To be honest, I stopped following after some 10 minutes. The pretentious dialogue blabbering, a direction so self-important that you could literally see the director’s erection when editing the slow-motion scenes, the constant feeling of apocalyptic relevance in the face of all its nothingness… very hard to stand. The static art of a graphic novel may be able to live with these overwhelmingly designed images of space, energy, desert and whatever – in a movie it is mega-kitsch designed by somebody who has nothing to say. What is the film about? Zip. What does it have to tell? Even less. After “300” it is now a fact to me that I do not ever want to see a Zack Snyder film again, as what he does is the opposite of what I would call a movie. “Wacthmen” actually is even worse than, say, “Transformers”, as it even lacks the slightest bit of humour or irony, is so full of itself that it literally explodes to pieces. Those sick, lost creatures with erectile dysfunction outside their superhero costumes could have been presented in many ways – to show them as if they were just straightforward world-saviours is terribly poor choice. A shame about actually the only comic movie that I was looking forward to this year. What a terribly dull year this will have been…

An interesting question is the filmability – many seem to agree that the book can justifiedly called unfilmable, but all agree that it looks like a movie storyboard.  “Watchmen wasn’t unfilmable, it was unreadable. A script doctor might have helped de-clutter the often incoherent story line and tart up the leaden chatter.” as I read somewhere, indeed!
More enthusiastic and willing to give it analytical credit
Entertaininlgy pissed-off review in the Washington Post