Well, I saw the movie adaptation of Watchmen at a special preview last night and I am happy to say it is I was not disappointed. I admit that I went into the theater with pretty low expectations so I’m afraid that any opinions I have are probably badly effected by the soft bigotry of low expectations. It’s interesting that none of my concerns were about how the director would treat the genre or willfully trample on the subject matter because it was originally a comic book. No, all of my concerns were based on how to cram all of that material into two hours, in my perfect world Watchmen would be a 12 episode HBO series. But anyway it was much better then all of my fears suggested. Yes it still felt like watching cliff-notes but I went in knowing that was unavoidable. Director Zack Snyder does a very good job lovingly recreating the most of the most memorable imagery in the book and throws in tons of minor little details that will award multiple viewings. Certainly there were several pragmatic changes to the story, but nothing really egregious. I suppose I could complain about how he increased the level of violence from the book and wonder about his obsession with slow motion shots but that would just be another example of me nitpicking. Instead I’ll dwell on the things I liked, such as the opening credits/expository montage done to Bob Dillon’s “Times They are a Changing“.
