I enjoyed the movie a lot. I guess all you guys who read the comic book were expecting more from it
It’s a very good, almost great, movie – better than Dark Knight (which needs its deranged villains to prop it up). The main obstacle for the film is that Moore’s graphic novel is overrated. While it’s certainly among the best, it isn’t quite the unequaled, cutting edge masterpiece it’s frequently hailed as. I’m not saying that Watchmen is derivative, but Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns did come out slightly ahead of it and presented a similar portrait of an aging superhero as a dark, burned out vigilante whose glory days are behind him, and the same cynical, Dr. Strangelove-ish parodies of both the political left and right.
One review I read carped about the film deviating from the plot of the graphic novel at the end, using Dr. Manhatten as the fall guy instead of fake aliens. As if Moore’s version was so exceptional. Come on, a plot about the successful scheme of a left wing fanatic ex-superhero to prevent nuclear war and create a safer world by uniting the US and USSR with a fabricated alien invasion is somewhat less than visionary. Not to mention dated even in its time, regardless of whether or not Moore was being ironic. The cold war had already thawed when he wrote it, in the Gorbechev 80s of glasnost and perestroika, and the world beyond is hardly a safer place. Moore’s rehashing of the Nixon-Vietnam era only gives the background a certain staleness.
Watchmen is Alan Moore trying to be hip and avant-garde literary in the graphic novel arena – in other words, showing off. He’s an elitist. And let’s face it, a lot of hardcore fans read Watchmen because they heard how cool it was and wanted to be cool as shit themselves for having read it. The movie was doomed from the start among these kinds of fans because no matter how it turned out, it could only diminish the coolness of the graphic novel by popularizing it among the general audience, thereby making them almost desperate to maintain a clear distinction between the two.