In case you didn’t read the title of the post, this review contains spoilers. I will now stick a big picture below so you can hit “Back” without seeing any of them.

Review and spoilers after the jump …

I had never heard of the Watchmen until I began seeing trailers for the movie last year. My curiosity piqued, I read the graphic novel and was blown away by the characters, the manyfold plot, the symbolism, and the unique and varying way in which  the book tells the story. And of course, the artwork was amazing. As I read the book, I thought, “There’s no way a movie based on this book would look bad.” After all, the panels were incredibly cinematic.

Now that I’ve seen the movie, I can report for certain that the production does look fantastic and faifthful to way things look in the book. The other aspects of what made the book great, however, are reproduced with less success.

The Characters

Jeffrey Dean Morgan was spot-on as the Comedian. Some of the other actors, not so much.

The movie does a pretty good job of presenting a couple of the characters. In fact, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the sadistic Edward Blake (the Comedian) might be the highlight of the movie. Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson also do credible jobs bringing to life Rorschach and Nite Owl II. However, some of the other major players fall short in the translation from the comic book pages to the silver screen. Ozymandias (played by Matthew Goode), for instance, was nowhere near the visionary, plotting magalomaniac that he was in the book. And while Malin Akerman fits into the outfit of Silk Spectre II well enough, she delivers her lines in a stiff, unconvincing manner. Billy Crudup, in the role of a heavily CGI-fied Dr. Manhattan, didn’t have the kind of voice that really effectively portrayed the charcter’s growingly detached psyche. Part of the problem with the characters stems from the dialog. While the lines may read fine on the pages of a comic book, they come off sounding very staged and awkward when spoken on-screen.

The Ending

Despite some issues with some of the characters, I was fine with the movie until the last half hour. Yes, they did change the ending: Instead of blowing up a giant space squid in New York City and tricking Earth into thinking it is under attack from aliens, Ozymandias instead sets off explosions in several large cities around the world using the powers of Dr. Manhattan, thus making the world think it was under attack by Dr. Manhattan. While the change still gets the same practical result of uniting the world against a common foe, the fact that that common foe is now Dr. Manhattan changes (and lessens) the meaning in his leaving the Earth for another galaxy at the end. To me, when he chose to leave for another galaxy at the end of the book, it was a sign of his having lost his newly regained faith and compassion for humanity. In the movie’s ending, it’s not really like he had a choice to not leave the Earth. After all, do we really think Manhattan’s fragile psyche could withstand living in a world where the world has declared war on him? While we can draw other symbolism and meaning from the movie’s ending, I personally preferred the book’s finish. I’m not saying the movie had to do a giant space squid (and it would’ve probably been cheesy and difficult to explain), but I thought it was a mistake to make Dr. Manhattan Earth’s common enemy.

The other thing I did not like about the ending was that it implied Nite Owl and Silk Spectre were going back to crimefighting. That may make for a nice, schmaltzy Hollywood ending, but it doesn’t fit with the story development that came before, when Ozymandias said, plainly, that the new world requires less obvious acts of heroism. The crime-fighting superhero is supposed to have been rendered obsolete by the new world order, and Rorschach, the only masked hero who was still fighting crime, is dead, so why are Nite Owl and Silk Spectre picking up the craft again?

The Back Story

One of the questions on my mind heading into the movie was how it would handle all the back story in the book that helped weave such an intricate backdrop for the plot. In this regard, I thought the movie did a fairly good job summarizing where necessary and eliminating parts without doing any significant damage. The opening credit sequence, set to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They’re A-changin’ ” served up an effective yet succinct summary of the rise and decline of the Minutemen. The entire pirate story subplot, as expected, was not included in the movie, which is quite understandable as there is simply no way to do that without making the movie twice as long and thoroughly confusing viewers who have not read the book. While the subplot does add symbolism in the book, its absence did not hurt the movie.

The Production

As I commented above, the movie looks terrific. There were many shots that duplicated their counterparts from the comic book, and the overall feel of the movie remained true to the book, replicating the alternate 1980s world. The gadgets and costumes all look pretty much like they are supposed to, and the Owl ship was a treat to behold.

One complaint I had was poor editing in some instances that hurt the storytelling. For instance, the sequence concerning Dr. Manhattan’s origins was cut in such a way that you would think he was seen reassembling himself even while they were holding his funeral. We also never see Rorschach sending off his journal, nor do we hear the final entry, so when we see it in the stack of mail at the newspaper office at the end, we don’t really know what significance that holds if we hadn’t read the book.

All in All

I would say this movie gets a 2.5 or 3 out of 5. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as it could’ve or probably should’ve been. The ironic thing is that I thought it successfully cleared its biggest hurdle — condensing the vast story of the book into a two-and-a-half-hour movie — only to stumble on some lesser ones that were much easier to deal with, such as poor acting, spotty editing, and a changed ending that had less impact and meaning.