My reactions to the film. I’m not going to explicate the plot, as I am more interesting in looking at the thematic devices, especially the handling of the character Rorschach, but there will probably certainly be some sort of spoiler material to follow. Mostly in discussion of the fact that Zack Snyder does not pull punches and my goodness do I love him for it. Nothing that will probably bother you if you have read the book, but have yet to see the movie, but in case you want to go in complete unpolluted, don’t read ahead.
Got that?
Really?
Sucka, if you didn’t listen, and are going to be mad at me for this, turn back now.
All right. Personally, I thought it was a very good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was never bored, and never too turned off by anything I was seeing on the screen in order to be distracted. I think the fact that it is down to a 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, especially having started out closer to an 80% with all early reviews raving, is ridiculous. The progression of these ratings seemed to be: early reviews were calling it genius. New reviews are calling it flawed genius. But does flawed genius make a movie “rotten”? No. I think without such a hype storm raising everyone’s hackles, it might have ended up in the mid-to-high 70’s, which is a good spot for a comic book movie with no pretensions of winning Oscars to be.
Now, I do think it was flawed. To begin with, I had to wonder: if I were not a fan of the book, had not read the book, or had even read the book but not paid that close of attention, would a lot of this have come off as strongly? For example, did the montage at the very beginning completely lose a new viewer? Did they ever truly get a grasp of who the Minutemen were and their place in it? I’m not sure, but it did give me pause. Was everything explained well enough? For example, they mentioned the “Keene Act”, but did they ever explain that was an Act that unmasked the masked men and made them illegal? I can’t recall. Personally, I enjoyed all these touches quite a bit, but I have read the book, more than once, and once very recently. That said, though, for fans of the comic, there were a lot of nice little touches – things you had to look for in the backgrounds (such as the “Millenium” poster in the end).
I understand some of the critics who have said that at times the movie was too in love with itself, too in love with its message, and that it came off as heavy handed because of it. I agree. There were moments where I thought to myself, “Really? There wasn’t a more subtle way to say/convey that?” Again, that said, I feel like this was worse toward the beginning of the film, and that it hit its stride going into it, but then some of the Ozymandias scenes reverted back to that.
I actually did not find the change to the ending to be offensive, and thought it worked quite well. Admittedly, when I first became aware that there had been a change, my hackles raised, I crossed my arms, and waited, but had faith that if Zach Snyder actually filmed the Comedian shooting a woman pregnant with his baby, he was not going to pull the final punch. Making Dr. Manhattan the manufactured by Ozymandias/abstract/non-human threat was, in my opinion, just as effective as making it an “alien thread” and required fewer scenes to do. The one thing I will say about that is that it thus became far too easy for the Comedian to figure it out. I liked that the fact he figured it out in the graphic novel was such a matter of chance. In the movie, you had to wonder: if Ozymandias was not able to do that without the Comedian seeing, what were any of them able to do? But it wasn’t that much of a distraction.
Oh but I was a little annoyed that Seymour (the kid in the very end who got the journal) was a brunette and not a redhead. Just because that robbed me from getting to say, “Gingers kill Utopia”, for a moment of ironic self-loathing. 
The stilted/stylized acting… was not done as well as I think it has been in some other movies, *but* I don’t think they should have gone for a realistic/naturalistic acting style either. I preferred that they went stylized, and it fell short, to them going naturalistic. The Watchmen was never trying to do what Dark Knight did in that it took a completely realistic approach to superhero films and that, I think, was one of the things that made it genius. It was a superhero comic in many ways, and it was still a literary masterwork, and that was what made it so fantastic. Any attempts to make a naturalistic film would have frustrated me. That said, there were people who I thought were better – Jeffrey Dean Morgan [Comedian], Jackie Earle Haley [Rorschach] – and people I thought were worse – Matthew Goode [Ozymandias].
The soundtrack… Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes it didn’t. “Times They Are a Changin’” was perfect; “99 Red Balooons”, maybe not as perfect. Admittedly, I am not sure what I would have preferred. I wouldn’t have wanted it to have done the usual fare of metal and hard rock comic movies frequently do, but I’m not sure I would have wanted it to do symphonic Oscar movie score. Maybe something in between. I’m not sure. I am certain that was one of the harder decisions.
Visually, I might have liked to see Snyder be as faithful to the visual source as he was to 300 and done something with a palette closer to the graphic novel just to see if he could pull it off, but I still enjoyed what he did instead. I never did not like looking at the movie. Again, a case where it was very much not naturalistic, and I thought that was good.
I knew the Pirate Story would not be there. Snyder said as much in the first panel he ever went to. I completely understand why it wouldn’t. It was a genius literary device. It was a: in case you don’t get it, here it is, plain as day, exactly what I want to say in this novel,and yet somehow it did not come off as cheap. Tied in with that were the ruminations of the newspaper salesman, representing both a sort of Greek chorus and also the common man’s position in all the uncommon events surrounding him, the terror of the end of the world that everyone felt at that time. *But* to address both of these things would have added… a lot of length to the movie. I am hoping maybe we will get Lord of the Rings style 3 1/2 hour extended editions in which we see it, and more of those characters, but I’m not holding my breath. I was happy enough that they were still present in the movie and I could see Old Bernard selling papers and Young Bernard obviously reading the Pirate Story.
Now, Rorschach’s character, who was so key to the novel, was, I think, handled okay, but I did think there was not enough of those small humanizing moments you get in the novel that lead up to Rorschach being the only one to oppose covering up what Ozymandias did, and dying for it. For example, I don’t know know why they left out his line, early in the graphic novel: “Nothing is insoluble. Nothing is hopeless. Not while there’s life.” For a man who would later claim to his therapist that there is nothing at all beautiful in human kind, that’s an amazingly optimistic statement. Also, the interesting use of the “Nostalgia” cologne produced by Veidt, tying in both with the woman in the picture in his room, and the bottle he kept in his pocket. I’m not sure what all there is to say about that but if nothing else, it instilled the idea of the world gone-mad-what-did-we-fight-for chaos that contributed to the necessity for such a broad, real threat to unite everyone. A Nostalgia for simpler times gone past.
Also, another missing thing was the most direct explanation for why it is his name is Rorschach and the further implications on the reader’s relationship with the story: that is, him going off to his psychiatrist about how he had wanted there to be a meaning, a purpose, a design, but that he had long since realized there was not, and any attempt of ours to create a reason for things being the way they are – “fate”, “god” – is more of a reflection of our own psyches and our own attempt to make sense of the world than any absolute existence of said things – much like we do a Rorschach blob. I thought this was huge because one of the secondary reasons I think his name is Rorschach is that he himself becomes the Rorschach test for the audience, as he is a very difficult character to make judgments about, to condemn or condone, and that trying to understand and judge him, you learn more about yourself than you do about him as a character.
Anyway, all of these things, as far as I am concerned, make this movie a work of flawed genius, but genius none the less, and easily the best Alan Moore adaptation to date. It was maybe an impossible book to film, but I think they did a damn good job of trying and may see it again before it leaves the theaters if for no other reason than to look for more of the nice little touches in the background I might have missed.
