All over the place today, comic fans are sitting around with funny smirks on their faces.  Finally one speaks up: “So what did you think?”

Well, as an avid comics fan and an extremely enthusastic fan of Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen graphic novel, I obviously have a lot to say about the film–both good and bad–but I’ll try to keep it brief, and I’ll also try not to spoil either the movie or the book for anyone.

First off, I’ll start with some of the better things about the movie.  The opening credits were incredible: as someone who’s read the GN twice, it was beautiful and invigorating to see so many accurate portrayals of the Watchmen universe.  So what the hell am I talking about?  Well, after an opening fight scene, the credits rolled over Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” while on-screen we see a sort of summarized history of the Watchmen universe: the original heroes posing for photos, beating up burglars dressed in full black and white garb, and all sorts of cool little details, things that would have been wholly appropriate the the Graphic Novel.  My personal favorite: there is a short segment in which Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup can painting has been changed to a multicolored portrait of Nite Owl I.

Speak of Bob Dylan, another real highlight of the film for me was the music.  I loved the fact that they kept with the setting (the 1980’s) and used music that was very appropriate.  There was a lot of 80’s music that was just cheesy enough to get the point across, and the rest of the soundtrack did it’s job well, including Hendrix’s Dylan cover, “All Along the Watchtower” and a perfect use of Philip Glass’s “Prophecies” from the score to Koyaanisqatsi.  But what I was most impressed with in terms of the music was the score: rather than sticking with the all-too-common Iron Man style nu-metal-ish rock (you know what I’m talking about) that’s supposed to make the characters somehow more badass, Watchmen had some genuinely cool score music reminiscent of Bladerunner’s score by Vangelis–lots of moody moogs and synths.

As far as some little bad things: there were three things that were overdone a bit.  One that I imagine we’ll start hearing about soon is that Nixon’s nose is ridiculously caricatured, to the point that it distracts and detracts from what he’s saying.  It’s huge!  The second was the sex scene: it was just about 7 or 8 seconds away from being really tasteful and perfect–the music worked really well and the movement and camerawork really grasped the gravity of the event–but there was just one thrusting position too many, and it pushed it just barely over the edge of necessity.  The third, which any of us should have guessed, is the gratuitous use of slo-mo.  It wasn’t nearly as overdone as it was in 300, but there were definitely moments when it seemed quite silly to have the characters moving in uber-dramatic slow motion.

Now, the inevitable part of any Watchmen review is upon us: how did it stand up to the book?  Well, to be honest, the movie was pretty much exactly as I imagined it would be, and was pretty much as good as I had hoped; this doesn’t mean that I wasn’t disappointed in some respects, but it was all expected.  The film does, for the most part, a wholehearted job of capturing the universe of Watchmen, but even in 2 hours and 45 minutes the film could not capture the feel, the depth, or the complexity of the universe portrayed in the Moore/Gibbons masterpiece.  Most fans of the GN have already heard that they changed the ending a bit–don’t worry I won’t spoil it–and the ending isn’t so bad, and I even understand why they changed it.  If you’ve read watchmen, you know how freaking insane the ending is, and if you’ve ever tried to explain to someone what the catastrophic event was and how it came about, you know how complicated it is.  I feel like the movie would’ve had to have been at least another 40 minutes longer to really fully explain that ending, and there just wasn’t that sort of time, but the ending they replaced it with was pretty suitable.  But in losing those key little aspects of the book–the street corner microcosm being the biggest casualty, although this might be included in the companion DVD Tales of the Black Freighter due out later this month–the film loses a big chunk of what made Watchmen so mind-blowingly good: that this world was just as real as ours, that it had every sort of person in it, and you can’t quite sympathize or hate any of them.

Conclusion:

Worth checking out. Me and my friends that saw it all came out with a sort of empty look on our faces.  While some parts of the film really were a joy to watch, it just lacked the soul of the graphic novel and didn’t seem to blow any of us away like The Dark Knight did.  We didn’t all walk out of the theater making plans for the second viewing, in other words.

For Fans of: The GN who are aching for just a little more of that intriguing world; fans of slo-mo action; people who’ve never heard of Alan Moore.

You Might Not Enjoy if: you’re a stickler for the graphic novel; you hated 300; you hate comic-movie adaptations; you have a tiny bladder.

• Info: IMDb
• Watch: Youtube Trailer
• Tickets: Fandango