who watches...

I'm still not sure where I sit with Watchmen, in fact, I didn't/haven't read any reviews save EW. I finally got the chance to finish the book from cover to cover at the beginning of the month (I started but never finished a handful of times.) SO, this means that it was super fresh. I've pontificated for years, and in this forum, that an adaptation is that, it's another view of the material from a different set of eyes. I guess that since Zach Snyder was SO literal, using pages as story boards, what little artistic interpretation was going to be good, a little spin.

So, this technically is movie no. 34 and a book to report on?

Well...I did love his musical choices. Spot on. Great mood, great focus of the time, clear cut. Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah? OMG, I thought I was gonna get off. Although, I secretly kept hoping that Muse was a choice not only for the trailers (I LOVE MUSE.)

Casting was great...except for Ozymandias. What was with the accent? It was as if Matthew Goode kept playing with it during filming, trying something different everyday. At first, I was thinking he was keeping to his cultural roots, using a pseudo-Euro accent for everyday and blue-blooded American for the press. I know that Patrick Wilson came across as a total pudding pop, but come on, Dreiberg IS a total smush, kinda washed up, living in the past. Laurie is what brings out his strength and adventurism again. (For the record, I watched Little Children today, which I'll talk about later. It was hot to see PW naked in two separate movies within a week.) Billy Crudup was everything that Manhattan needed to be. Glib. Matter of fact. Nearly devoid of emotion. For some actors, that description would be the kiss of death. Crudup is a great actor, I can't imagine how weird it was for him to go in the full fiber optic suit. He's not the green screen kind of guy. Malin, she was just hot. It was hard to look at her and not think about the stupid gits she's played on screen, but wasn't that the point? Laurie's far from stupid, but she's a young, selfish girl. Jeffrey Dean Morgan? I've had the hots for him forever, he's so not my type. His Comedian was tough, mean and sad all in one ball of leather and muscle. He can chomp on my cigar any day.

The crowning jewel is Jackie Earle Haley. He is spot on, everything I wanted and we deserved. No mas. I'll spoil anything he did on screen by saying anything more.

Snyder was able to capture emotion and mood much better than I expected, especially the climax on Mars. Although I think it needed more backstory, I felt every beat and facial tick to where Manhattan remembers what it means to be human, the human miracle.

I understand why Zach didn't have an alien vagina descend on NYC. The copy-cat attacks on multiple international cities had more weight and connection with 2009 coming from Manhattan. Yes, this film is about an alternate reality to the world in 1985. But it also needs to connect with people in 2009 and having it be more about global terrorism, that's very topical and it does work for the story. Do I wish he would have kept it intact? Yeah, kinda. But the whole exposition of the brain trust hired to disappear, the creature, etc, would have been messy. Like the Black Freighter. Although it paralleled and was a distinct compass, it had to be cut out. The movies damn long as is. Like the Top Knots. We get a glimpse of them, but don't know anything. I was hoping for Laurie's Devo joke (especially since Tommy's mixing them at Sx this weekend), but there are alot of things that need to be cut, just because. We didn't see or hear anything about our lesbian friends, masked or not. The ending could be kinda confusing because we don't really learn anything about The New Frontiersman...

Choices to make things more violent (hello, the kidnapper scene with the kids leg and burying the hatchet rather than burning him down?), snip back stories (Osterman & Janey).

The opening sequence was great - it captured the history and depicted the main event of the Comedian's death better than I could have imagined. It was the one big stamp of artistic measure we can attribute to Snyder. That was his. Not much else was.

I'm sure I can say more, but I'm spent. Leave it up to the reviews and fan boys, eh?