Watchmen: The Unfilmable

For years, people thought that Watchmen would never be made into a movie. The story is very layered and takes place over a span of 40 years. Not only that, but half the story is told in flashbacks; the main narrative takes place in 1985, but the events leading up to the main story are just as important as the plot itself. Furthermore, superheroes were seen as a children's genre for a long time, but Watchmen is an adult story through and through. But with the success of The Dark Knight, which proved that superhero movies could be deep, and 300, which proved that R-rated comic book movies could be successful, Warner Bros. realized that the time had finally come for a film adaptation of Watchmen.

For the most part, the movie is extremely faithful to the book. The biggest change (as opposed to omission) is the ending, which stays true to the theme of what happened (to a degree anyway; there was an interesting article on Ain't It Cool News about why the changed ending isn't as thematically similar as it appears to be, but I can't seem to find it). There are omissions, because there is only so much of the 12-issue story that can be crammed into (almost) 3 hours. Most of the details of the original Minutemen were excised, some of the details of Nite Owl II's and Silk Spectre II's backstory were cut, and the "Tales of the Black Freighter" story was cut entirely. Although "Freighter" seems superfluous on its face, its deeper meaning and relevance to the "villain's" plan takes away some of the "villain's" sympathy.

Speaking of which, the portrayal of the "villain" was, sadly, not as impressive as a few of the cast members. The actor seemed to give off a sense of menace as opposed to... well, I can't say, but he/she didn't really strike the right tones. For the most part, the actors all did great jobs in their characters (especially Jackey Earle Haley as Rorschach), but there were a few weak links. I shouldn't go too far into this in order to avoid giving away various identities, but I was happy overall with the performances.

Watchmen wasn't a perfect adaptation, but it was still a commendable job. I'd say my biggest pet peeve is that Zack Snyder needs to lay off the slow motion, so at least it had nothing to do with the story. I still think that a miniseries would have worked better, but what we got was definitely a lot better than it could have been (especially based on previous versions of the script).

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