I am aware that my compatriot has already written a review for this film but I felt that a release of this magnitude deserved a second look.

First of all, I felt I had to comment on a really insignificant detail: the Crimebusters never got off the ground. Rorschach acts on his own, not as the last remaining member of some bygone hero team. Apologies to you, sir, if it seems middling but it sets the tone for whats to come.

Along those same lines, in the movie the non-starter team is not called the Crimebusters. The name was changed to the Watchmen. Do studios have such a low opinion of movie-going audiences that they assume we’ll forget which movie we’re there seeing? Is the concept of “watchmen” so foreign to people that it has to be removed from the abstract and placed in the concrete? Like I said, middling.

One of my favourite sequences, Rorschach’s sessions with Dr. Malcolm Long (leading up to the origin story), seems to have been cut entirely. It shaves off some time, but who cares?! This is one of the greatest character dissections in comics history, I’ll watch an extra ten fucking minutes. Although Rorschach demanding his face from Dr. Long was kind of cool. His voice remained the same though, with and without the mask. I hope someone got fired for that blunder.

As for the ending, I thought it worked better theactrically as it trimmed quite a bit from the story without losing sight of the characters that were important. This ending didn’t really convey the complex nature of a mind like Ozymandias’, though, as the scale and effort wasn’t as enormous as in the graphic novel/mini series but explosions are good too. Fine. Moving on.

I left the theatre feeling strange. I hadn’t decided if I liked the movie or not which is out of the ordinary as I am usually opinionated about things that I love (I love them). Changes are forgivable if they help expediate the story (the above mentioned, and others, were begrudgingly accepted) and some of the casting was inspired. I even thought that Crudup’s voice fit Dr. Manhattan’s bored way of doing things quite well. Watchmen works as a film even if you haven’t read a single page of it, apparently, and as an adaptation I suppose it works well enough. To me, the commiting of Alan Moore’s Watchmen to celluloid finalizes a chapter in my life that I’m not sure was ready to be finalized. There are only so many times you can go to the same well, I’ve read it too many times and now I’ve seen the movie. I need the promise of Watchmen in another form, or better yet, more Watchmen material! As long as it doesn’t compromise the original vision. Not even in the face of armageddon.