I've been a huge fan of Watchmen since first discovering it when I was a teenager. Unlike a lot of people, I was pretty apprehensive about there being a Watchmen movie. I felt the the story was too dense, too intricate and too costly to bring to the big screen. The other problem I have is the willing suspension of disbelief. This can be acheived more easily in comics because comics do not present themselves as the real world. It's a parallel reality made out of pen and ink. Once you take superheroes out of that reality and into ours, they look a bit absurd. Zac Snyder seemed to be torn between wanting--really wanting-- to throw all these cool looking characters into the cold light of day but decided instead to wrap them in murky, grainy visuals. He knew that without this, you'd just be looking at middle aged guys in costumes.

I guess you can take it from this that I was less than satisfied by the movie. My opinion of it has mellowed a bit since I saw it on Friday, but ultimately it just felt flat. It felt like actors just reading lines out of the book and not a dramatisation. At the end of the graphic novel, the delicate strands of the mystery that has been unfolding throughout the tale come together beautifully. In the movie we get a garbled infodump.

I think it's worth watching just for the novelty of seeing all these images from the book made flesh-- and whoever Synder got to play Rorshach was totally spot on in his performance. And of course, Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman looked gorgeous! The costumes and set designs deserved high praise also.