Why Bother Watching the Watchmen?

The 2009 film Watchmen was not as bad as I feared but not as memorable as the original graphic novel that inspired it. Some have described this as perhaps the best possible adaptation we could hope for on the big screen and sadly I think they are right. I suspected that the film would be in trouble when the pre-credit sequence showed a masked figure with a distinctive costume killing a key character and then the opening credits showed yet another key character wearing almost the same type of costume that the killer wore (only without a mask), thus blowing any suspense the movie might have had about whom the mystery killer was. It did manage to pull off some memorable scenes despite all that but I suspect the scenes that will be best remembered all took place in those opening credits I just mentioned.

The biggest problem with the movie was that director Zack Snyder seemed all too eager to depict the world that Watchmen creator Alan Moore made -- a world in which superheroes really existed and changed human history -- yet he seemed not quite capable of convincingly portraying the negative side of such a world. As a result, his movie's characters never came across as believable as their graphic novel equivalents and many scenes that should have been quite dramatic -- such as the one in which the superheroes (aka the Watchmen) break up a riot -- seemed more than a bit static. Here and there the movie showed promise -- thus the memorable scenes mentioned above -- but as a whole, it was a big disappointment.

Oh, well. At least the original source material has not changed.