Watchmen Review

Anyone familiar with the Watchmen comic series will undoubtedly be able to say it is more then a simple costumed crusaders versus fiendish villains narrative. The story that takes place in Watchmen is one so mind jogging, that I will not bother to try to explain it here (sparing some few basic plot outlines) and leave the summarizing up to the analysts who control the Watchmen Wikipedia page.
Watchmen is one of the few films I have seen that has taken an item from a pre-existing concrete medium and converted it to a movie that is sufficient and respectable enough to bare the same name as the original copy. The characters all looked and acted just like I had pictured them to, and the scenes flowed together with the same pre-imagery that I had cooked up while reading the books.
The downside to that is I knew what was coming, but personally I received more of a thrill out of seeing the pages come to life then from the actual plotline. In fact, I didn’t really care too much at all for the plotline in the book. I am sure it was a stimulating read back in the 1980’s before comic books were considerable for adults, but in 2008 (when I read it) Watchmen was just a slow-paced volume of anti-heroes trying to fit into an alternate society.
The movie is just that. A slow paced film about a group of down on their luck, yesterdays heroes, who are just trying to move on with their lives. Then somebody gets the idea to start killing them, and the story starts there.
The plot twists are easily predictable, and the movie doesn’t do a very good job of explaining certain things, for example: who Moloch was.
Other then that though, Watchmen is a well executed movie, keeping the characters true to the books, as well as having it all fit nicely together.
I don’t really recommend the books to anyone who isn’t really into comic books, but reading the Watchmen series will defiantly help explain some things that the movie skimmed over.
The visuals were, of course, high quality. Zach Snyder (300) is well known for his slow motion effect shots, but I’ve never had a problem with that type of cinematography, at least his anyway. Snyder never uses too much slow motion and always to emphasize something epic or cool. I would much rather be able to look at a scene and watch each punch fall in slow motion, rather then get dizzy watching a flurry of martial arts moves that seems to be the style in the Bourne movies.
I can’t really give the movie credit for having good lines and cool scenes, since it’s all from the book, but I will rate it on how well the movie took the material in the book and transformed it into an impressively assembled movie that covers all the main points that the book did. 7.5 /10