Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Watchmen Movie

9 times out of 10, trash literature makes for the best cinema. It is infinitely easier to add depth to something shallow than to subtract it from something deep. In order to fit a classic work into an acceptable run time something has to give. Apparently nobody told this to the makers of Watchmen.

Though the presence of brightly colored costumes and giant squids might lead you to believe otherwise, Watchmen is a dense, dense read. Its' ideas about love, war and heroism require time to digest. But in the filmic incarnation there is simply no time to digest anything. It's the cinematic equivalent of racing through the Louvre...with fight scenes!

OK. Now I know the above statement comes off pretty harsh, but believe me this isn't a call to gang up on Zack Snyder. The sequence about Dr. Manhattan's origin as well as Rorschach's psych evaluation are both devastatingly effective. You feel his reverence for the material in every frame. You can tell that he understands the ideas that are at play. He was simply crushed under the sheer volume of them.

For years people will debate how the material might have been better served by flimmaker X,Y and Z but there's really no point. This is the movie we got so suck it up. Homeboy did as good a job as anyone could have.  No filmmaker, no matter how great, would have been able to make a film that satisfied everyone (though I will admit that most anyone could have made better use of music).

Now let's put all of our petty grievances aside and unite in fear of the cinematic squid creature known as Uwe Boll who threatens to attack our collective good taste at any minute.

Catch you in the funny papers.