Thoughts on Watchmen

I saw Watchmen at its midnight showing with three friends. One had read the book, two hadn't, so I think we had a pretty good cross section of opinions. As we left, one of my friends who hadn't read the book said, "For a superhero movie, there sure was a lot of talking." I think that probably summed up its lack of mainstream appeal.

This may be the first time I've ever said this, but the movie was too much like the book. It was basically a perfect panel for panel/shot for shot reconstruction of the graphic novel, and it just didn't work.  My friend who had read the book and I decided that it was like taking a poem written and Spanish, and translated it word for word into English. Sure, you get the gist of the thing, but all the nuance and complexity is lost. This movie was a word for word translation, instead of an adaption. 

I really think they should have taken some more risks and taken full advantage of the different medium. Yeah, Alan Moore would've been pissed, but really, there wasn't any way he was going to praise the movie. And since it ended up being basically a moving comic book, why not just read it in its original intended format? 

The things I liked best about the book (for instance, Dr. Manhattan's life reflections while on Mars) just didn't work that well on the screen. There were lots of things I liked: the actors were great, the look of everything was excellent, and the soundtrack was amazing. (The opening montage explaining America's alternate history set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" was flat out awesome.) But even with all those things that I liked, overall, I didn't really like the movie. At the end of it, I just kept thinking, I wouldn't read a novelization of ANY movie as opposed to just watching the movie, so why would anyone want to do the reverse?