Who's Watching the Watchmen?

I was!

I saw the movie tonight after all with three of my friends.
Surprisingly enough the theater was not packed - we bought our tickets an hour early, walked right in without waiting in any sort of line at all and found good seats. No one sat in front of us. Few people behind us. Kind of magical. I was shocked. Everyone was clammering to get into IMAX leaving the rest of the screens only half-full.

For those who are wondering - the comic is better. But Zack Snyder deserves recognition for having the guts to turn the work of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons into a film. And it's not a bad film. None of my compadres read the comic - one had never heard of it until today - and all of them enjoyed the film.

I thought it was alright. Most of the GN is in there - in fact some of the most iconic scenes of the comic appear on screen, which was awesome. There were a few omissions - the crazy pirate story was cut out and the giant squiddy monster thing was no where to be found, but I don't think most fanboys and girls will complain.

No, the problem with the movie was the pacing. You literally feel like you've been sitting for nearly three hours. And there were parts of the plot where if I had not read the GN I would have been confused as to what was actually going on. Somehow the writers and director got EVERYONE'S story and backstory and the myriad of plot twists in there - sometimes it worked out, other times you scratch your head for a few minutes as you jump back and forth in time and between plotlines.

However they get Rorschach RIGHT. No character in the GN compares to him. He never loses his convictions or integrity, not once. You have to wonder what society would be like if more people behaved like him. Maybe we'd all be sociopaths, but we would be easy to decipher sociopaths.

"I'm not locked in with you - you're locked in with me!"