The Pros and Cons of the ‘Watchmen’ Film

Pros:

• The Dr. Manhattan flashback sequences were well done. The Doc’s backstory is one of the most poignant parts of the book, and it is delivered with pretty much the right mix of feeling and detachment.
• Good performances by Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Rorschach and the Comedian. Both of them gave a very good idea of what their characters were all about.
• The movie did not tone down the violence of the book. In fact, if anything it turned it up, in some cases quite gratuitously.

Cons:

• A key facet of the ‘Watchmen’ comic was the juxtaposing of scenes and symbols to create a greater degree of depth in the meaning of the work. This is a technique that could have – at least in part – been translated to film, but it is mostly absent. As a result, in some scenes the pacing and dialogue of the film seem rather odd.
• The story is set in 1985, but apart from a few retro hairstyles, the look of the film hardly conveys this fact. That being the case, why not set it in the present day with the Americans having won the Iraq war and George W. Bush being elected President for a third term? Such changes would also have a similar resonance with modern-day filmgoers as having the Americans win in Vietnam and Nixon as President had on the original audience.
• In the book, the Nite-Owl and the Silk Spectre are relatively normal people dressed up in costumes, not the brutal fighting machines they are in the film. It is hard to see how they could be scared of anything given the way they tear into the Knot-top gang, despite having been several years in retirement.
• On that point, it is a shame that none of the ‘normal’ characters could have been fleshed out a bit. A major theme of the book was how they react to the super-heroes and threat of impending war; here their viewpoint is almost entirely absent.
• Ozymandias does not smirk. He may as well have written ‘I am up to something’ on his forehead.