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You know that “Watchmen” motion comic that was put out just prior to the movie, animating many of the pivotal sequences of the story and bringing them to a sort of “still life?” Everything as beautiful as you remember it from the first time you read Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ landmark achievement in comic fiction, now coming to life in a picturesque, yet oddly waxy and animatronic sort of way?

Seeing this movie was kind of like that–a massively detailed and lavishly faithful animation of the classic work, with enough changes to actually (gasp!) improve on the story in some spots, but basically betraying its roots as a comic book–a series of very pretty panels and sequences without much of the connective tissue that makes it a real story.

Obviously, there are HUGE SPOILERS after the jump, so if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, do NOT read any further. This is your only warning.

Since there’s just so much to go over, I’ll break this down into my usual “Like” and “Dislike” categories and go bullet-point style.

What I Liked

• Zack Snyder’s attention to detail and mastery of production design was astounding. The meticulousness by which he created not only New York City circa 1985, but a New York irrevocably altered by the presence of superheroes, blew me away. Even the littlest touches (Annie Leibovitz taking pix of Adrian Veidt, for instance) were brilliantly executed. And the visuals were eye-popping to the extreme. From the long pan of the Comedian being thrown out the window to the shattering of the floating palace on Mars, the movie is a feast for the geeky eyes in every respect.
• In much the same way that Ron Perlman is Hellboy, Jackie Earle Haley is Rorschach. He looked, sounded, and acted exactly the way the character should have been–the way I bet most of us imagined him to be. Note-perfect in every way, and he got the biggest and best audience responses throughout, with his famous line “YOU’RE LOCKED UP IN HERE WITH ME!” eliciting a huge cheer from the crowd. What that says about the audience is probably best left for another day.
• Malin Akerman and Carla Gugino both looked very nice in their respective Silk Spectre costumes, and Malin looked even nicer out of hers. It’s nice to see a relatively A-list actress who isn’t Angelina Jolie being unafraid to bare it all on camera these days. It was a nice counterbalance to the omnipresent Junk Of Dr. Manhattan that periodically floated into frame. Carla Gugino was stellar as Sally, but when is she not, really?
• Speaking of which, Dr. Manhattan rivals Gollum as probably the best fully-realized CG character ever created. At no point during the film did his interactions with any of the cast ring false. He looked, acted, and felt like he was there. I also think giving him Billy Crudup’s normal voice actually did well for the character. We all expected him to have this deep, booming, Godlike voice, but he actually did a better job essaying that calm distance of Manhattan as he detached further from life.
• I also really liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian–he generally plays such nice, heroic guys that it was awesome to see him be a soulless bastard for once.
• I also have to give Snyder credit for not skimping on the sex and violence in “Watchmen”–if anything, he ups the ante considerably, especially during the fight in the alleyway with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. That had so many bone breaks and eye gouges I actually got a bit queasy. Much the same is true with their sex scene on the Owlship–Patrick Wilson and Malin Akerman go at it like they were in a porno, God bless ‘em. This is absolutely not a movie for kids, and as much as I think kids shouldn’t be sheltered or coddled, if you bring anyone younger than 13 to see this film, you have problems. Seriously.
• The big change to the ending–removing the squid and replacing it with a frameup of Dr. Manhattan–actually makes perfect sense. It’s simpler, more elegant, and gives Manhattan his final impetus to just leave the planet, severing his last tie with humanity. Believe it or not, not everything Alan Moore has done has been made of pure gold (as he’d probably say himself), and any story worth its salt can survive alteration as necessary. Which leads me to…

What I Disliked

• I knew going in that there’d be so much missing from the film simply for budget and time reasons, but without the deeper explorations of the character histories, we really don’t have much empathy for the characters. Silk Spectre II, especially, suffers from lack of development (and the deletion of her smoking habit), as does Nite Owl II. The most “normal” of the characters are also the least interesting as a result, and the audience got noticeably bored every time the story returned to them, except when they were kicking ass.
• Malin Akerman is apparently a decent comedic actress–I never saw “The Heartbreak Kid” or her arc on “Entourage,” though I do remember her from “Witchblade,” believe it or not. But whether it’s because she can’t do drama or Snyder was directing her like George Lucas did Natalie Portman, all of her lines were very flat and monotonal. Even at the moments when Laurie is supposed to be hitting her emotional core, it just comes off as middling at best.
• Same with Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl, really. The famous sequence where Laurie confronts a naked Dan in his lair, ruminating over his past–one of the most powerful moments in the book–led to giggles over Wilson’s ass cheeks flapping in the breeze. He just couldn’t sell the moment, though he does do well at other points in the film. Ultimately, he’s just kind of there, and not really memorable.
• Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias was the biggest disappointment. This foofy fop with the purple jacket and “Batman Forever” reject costume is the world’s smartest and most dangerous man? I just wasn’t feeling it. Again, he really suffers from the cuts to the story and cramped narrative–you don’t feel anything when you realize the depth of Veidt’s monstrous acts, because the character is all surface and glitz, and that particular surface is of a backup singer for an ’80s synth-pop band.
• The usage of famous personalities ranging from Pat Buchanan to Henry Kissinger was largely on point, but the prosthetics used to essay Robert Wisdom’s Nixon were just ridiculously over-the-top and took you out of the scene every time he was on screen–which was surprisingly often.
• The decision to change the ending was sensible, but downplaying the gore and brutal aftermath of the deaths of millions is a bad decision, especially when we’ve just spent over two hours watching people get maimed, hacked to pieces, beaten to death, burned alive, etc. is unforgivable cowardice, and an indictment of the messed-up moral double standards in Western society.

Overall

I often complain that the problem with much of modern pop culture storytelling is that it puts character interaction above plot, leaving questions unanswered and motives murky as writers go for emotional hooks or punches in the gut (See “Lost,” “BSG,” Brubaker’s “Captain America,” etc.) “Watchmen” is the opposite of that. In order for the complex, ambitious, densely packed narrative to make sense, screenwriter David Hayter and Snyder excised much of the connective tissue of the story, leaving a lot of plot points that we lurch forward to hit, then it’s off to the next one. “Watchmen” is a bunch of beautiful set piece reenactments of a classic story, but it’s like watching animatronic wax dummies come to life–you really can’t bring yourself to care about any of them, and thus a major disservice is done to the deeper themes of the work.

Still, I’d rather see someone fail for being too ambitious than too middling, and Snyder has done an incredible piece of work in many places here. Anything that furthers the cause of complex, unapologetically R-rated theatrical storytelling for adults in this world of dumbed-down sanitized PG-13 pap, I am down for the clown.

In fact, I want to emphasize strongly here this point: Given the notoriously risk-averse nature of studio execs, who demanded some truly horrifying changes to make the story more of a typical superhero action fest, it’s a miracle that Snyder was able to stay as faithful to the story as he did. It’s an even bigger miracle that Warner Brothers greenlit a legendarily “unfilmable” graphic novel where there’s barely a sympathetic character to be found, the most memorable character is a masked psychopath with severe mother issues, and the story ends with the deaths of millions of people around the world. That shit is AMAZING when you really stop to think about it.

But supporting a piece of art on an ideological basis isn’t the same as enjoying it for its merits, and while I suspect “Watchmen” will fiercely divide people on the opinion spectrum for months or years to come, to me, it’s just kind of in the middle–not a failure, but not an adrenalin-rushed triumph.

Not the reaction Snyder was hoping for, I suspect.