The Plot: When The Comedian (Morgan), a former superhero and government operative, is found murdered, Rorschach (Haley), the country's lone remaining vigilante, starts an investigation into the killing.  Other former superheroes, including Ozymandias (Goode), Nite Owl (Wilson), Silk Spectre (Akerman), and Dr. Manhattan (Crudup), the only hero with actual superpowers, become involved in the case to various degrees.

Hey, remember how we looked just like this in the comic?  Yeah, me neither.

The Flax Take:
It’s hard to know which audience Watchmen really appeals to.  There’s the audience that’s never read the graphic novel and is looking for an action-packed superhero movie, but it’s hard to imagine them being satisfied – those unfamiliar with the original work will likely find themselves lost in places, and the action pales in comparison with, say, The Dark Knight.  But what does the film really offer fans of the original work?  Director Zack Snyder certainly does a fine job recreating the appearance of individual panels, but most of the layers beneath the surface have been scrubbed.  Where Alan Moore, the writer of the graphic novel, endeavored to give us an onion, Snyder is content merely to deliver the skin.

On what merits should Watchmen be judged, anyway?  To lay it out against the comic seems unfair, given the shift in medium and that there are certainly plenty of viewers who will enter the theater untainted by images of the original work.  But how can the film possibly be viewed on its own terms when every attempt is made to resemble the source?  There are changes here and there – Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) has been given a costume that is perhaps less silly than the more directly owl-based getup he sports in the comic; the ending has been substantially altered, likely because the original was deemed a bit too weird – but most of the dialogue is right off the page, and the bulk of the images are too.

Unfortunately, that’s where the resemblance ends.  In an attempt to squeeze the entirety of the basic plot into a nevertheless draggy two-hour, 45-minute run time, the script pares things down to the bare minimum required for coherence, stripping out what were no doubt seen as inessential details, plotlines, and characters.  The end result looks plenty like the comic, but has no depth whatsoever.  The psychological complexity of Moore’s characters has often been cited in rave reviews of the graphic novel; while to my mind the depth is overstated, it’s certainly far more than we get here, which is to say not much.  What little exists is doled out in heavy-handed dialogue; the few lines that aren’t cribbed directly from the comic’s pages tend to fall flat, though it doesn’t help that few of the actors seem totally up to the task.  (Wilson’s not bad, but only Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach really hits a home run.)

When you look at an adaptation that changes so little from its source material, you have to look at it and wonder what, if anything, is being added.  Does the movie have any reason to exist when the graphic novel can be found in any bookstore?  The answer, to my mind, is no.  While there is some thrill for fans simply in being able to see the pictures move, it’s hard to believe this wouldn’t wear off fairly quickly, and beyond that there’s just not much there.  It’s not a terrible movie, but most of that is attributable to the fact that it isn’t based on terrible source material.  The few plot changes that the movie makes are largely bad, and Snyder commits several key errors in executing the film – there’s too much slow motion and the soundtrack choices often don’t work.  (And that's before considering the idea that the heroes have been made just a little too physically super for the film version, a stark contrast with the more vulnerable characters of the comic.)  The panels of the comic may be interpreted with extreme literalism, but that’s a big part of the problem; too much effort was spent on getting the look right at the expense of the meaning.  The script has a tendency to compress the comic by taking lines originally said by one character and shoving them into the middle of another character’s dialogue; the end result is stripping many such lines of their import, while adding nothing.

Whatever perks might be added to the body of Watchmen by delivering it in film form, they’re offset and then some by the problems.  Seeing the characters in motion is hardly a positive when they’re thrust into awkward, overly-extended fight scenes with deafening foley effects, or delivering lines that have lost much of their weight due to the film’s refusal to plumb the characters’ personal depths the way the comic did.  The film is hardly unwatchable, but it’s difficult to justify its length when so much still goes missing, and it’s difficult to justify it at all when the comic is so much richer.  It might offer the novelty of movement, but Watchmen just doesn’t work right in this medium.