Though somehow I strangely really enjoyed the opening credits the most. I don’t mean that in a terrible way. I just thought that the images presented were done in a really awesome way and the styling was really well thought out.

it’s like, the movie had everything that SHOULD make a movie good. Good acting, complex plot, attention to details, visually stunning and excellent camera work. And it followed the comic decently well. (still, sad about the lack of squid. but oh well.)

and yet the length and complexity of plot that made this such an amazing comic book made it a movie that was inaccessable and, dare i say it… boring. As a movie, this needed heavy editing to be watchable and accessable. I would have gone less in depth with the history of the charachters for the movie.

It’s weird. this movie was good in all the aspects that people think should make a good movie. and yet i found it completely unenjoyable to watch because the complexity of the plot distracted from it. By the time you got done learning the charachter’s histories, you forgot all about the impending nuclear war and how the heroes relate to it at all, especially if you haven’t read the book.

my final word on it is that the story dosen’t work in the format of the movie. It worked great in the format of a comic book, where the aspect of reading allowed self directed pacing and processing of the plot, and the art clarified, and set the mood and helped the pace. In the format of a movie, where you have to process the story at the pace the movie dictates, the story didn’t work. A story has to stand alone in it’s medium of telling, be it a book or a movie, for people who are unfamilliar with the story to begin with, or it’s not sucessful. (preaching to the choir, if you will) some things, by virtue or lack there of, of the telling medium, will simply lend themselves to one format over another. This is one of those cases.

So I’m a big fan of the book. and a major comic book nerd in general. I did my best to avoid pretty much every review or special or basically any information about the movie at all until it came out because I wanted the book to be my only expectation.

My opinion is that it was good. A good movie and a good adaptation. But, honestly…is more than good too much to ask of what’s considered the greatest comic book ever written? I mean, yes, they told the same story, got the same message across, all the stuff they left out wasnt that necessary or important but…even if it wasnt important, it enhanced the story. The newsvender and the details on the minutemen and the detailed back stories and the life of Rorschach’s therapist were the things that took it from being a great book to an AWESOME book.

I suppose I’m asking too much of the movie industry, or maybe I’ll get lucky this ‘director’s cut’ they’re talking about will solve all this. But that’s my final say. I’m happy with the movie as it is and I enjoyed it, but it really could have been so much more.

The ending (besides the fact that there’s no giant alien bug thing from another dimension) was where they deviated most from the comic. As I remember it, the comic ends with most of the ensemble going, “Well, this sucks. I guess you win, Ozymandias, you fucker” and going home while Dr. Manhattan quietly vaporizes Rorschach in the tundra and tells everyone he’s probably going to die of exposure so they shouldn’t worry about him. In the movie, Nite-Owl witnesses Rorschach’s gory vaporization and *flips out*, screaming “Nooooooo!” and proceeding to beat the crap out of Ozy, who decides to let him. Weaksauce! Then and only then does he go, “Well, this sucks. I guess you win, Ozymandias, you fucker” and go home. There’s also a denouement that I don’t remember being in the graphic novel which dramatized a bit too explicitly how well Ozymandias’s plan was working. It felt heavy-handed, especially the jab at Reagan which seemed implicitly to also be a criticism of Bush. The whole thing was way too happy and then it was heavy-handed in a completely different way. Oh well. It didn’t ruin the movie.

It seems like the filmmaker spent more time generally trying to establish all the characters as bad-asses; all the non-powered, non-genius vigilantes seem a little more superhuman than they were in the comic, but whatever, it’s more fun to watch them that way. They don’t shy away from making Nite-Owl balding and flabby (yet still somehow an incredibly badass crime-fighter), which pleasantly surprised me. I was afraid they’d make him look like Christian Bale or something, but I honestly thought the casting was spot-on perfect for everyone involved. I hadn’t previously imagined Dr. Manhattan so mild-sounding, but it works wonderfully. It was interesting that the director somehow managed to get a cast of actors that no one has heard of (as far as I know) based entirely on how well they fit the characters rather than what they’d add to the box office returns. Does that ever happen in a big budget movie?

Showcasing that Nite-Owl (even after being retired and sedentary for years, which was puzzling) and Rorschach are both unstoppable avatars of crime-fighting devastation also helped effectively show how much better at everything Ozymandias was. As I said, I didn’t mind it, even if it seemed implausible. I suspect most people will just shrug and say, “They’re superheroes, whatever.”

I thought the soundtrack was well-chosen and effective, and I love hearing good music played over good speakers. A lot of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but it fit. “All Along the Watchtower,” of course. “There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.” And “99 Luftballons,” naturally. Everything was something you could have heard in 1985, I think, other than the fact that My Chemical Romance played during the credits. But it was a Bob Dylan cover, so that was okay.

What strikes me the most, is that in all of the bad reviews they’re actually bashing Moore’s original work. Apparently the movie would have been “better” to Hollywood if Snyder’d hacked the original work up to focus on Rorschach, say.

Of course, Hollywood gave us Beverly Hills Chihuahua, so what the hell do they know…

SPOILERS BELOW

The squidless thing that pissed everyone off so much, I actually thought was a good decision. What they ended up doing worked, and in fact worked better in the context of the film than the squid would have. But I had to wonder, why be so slavishly, at times illogically, devoted to getting every little detail in when you’re going to change something so big? For instance, the sequence with “Times They Are A’Changing” was really cool for me to watch, but if I hadn’t already read about the events they were depicting over several days, would it have just been confusing?
An example of Z.S. just not paying attention was the sign outside Hollis’ garage. Not only was it there, but the camera stayed on it for a good second or two: “Obsolete models a specialty!” In the world of the comic, gas cars are obsolete because of Dr. Manhattan’s new fuel. But in the movie, the world is still using fossil fuels (a decision I’m neutral about), so there ARE no obsolete cars. Old-fashioned, yes, but not obsolete. It seems to me proof that Snyder was more focused on little tiny fanboy details than looking at the big picture. But then, he was willing to change something so big as the ending to make the film work better as a stand-alone piece, so why not all these other things that kept it from working as such?
And there ya go.