Watchmen (2009)

"A terrific comic-book movie, the most completely satisfying and unsettling one I've ever seen.  Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"Snyder's Watchmen keeps moving so assuredly, it's nearly impossible not to get swept along.  Keith Phipps, The Onion A.V. Club
"...studded with inspired spectacles: fights and flights and imaginary creatures and reworked bits of history.  Shawn Levy, Portland Oregonian
"This movie will shake your windows and rattle your walls.  Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
"The casting clicks; the visuals have leaped right out of Dave Gibbons' original panels; the action is brutal, stylish and well-staged...  William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Editor's Note For those obsessed with the critically acclaimed graphic novel (which would be almost anyone who has read it), or for audiences looking for a stylish action film, WATCHMEN is worth--well--watching. But those who thought THE DARK KNIGHT was too gloomy should stay far away from Zack Snyder?s film. As far as superhero movies go, this graphic adaptation of the comic book series from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons makes even Christopher Nolan?s Batman films look like Saturday morning fare. Director Snyder and the screenwriters certainly deserve credit for crafting an adaptation of a work that has been deemed unfilmable since its 1986 release. Mammoth and mazelike, WATCHMEN follows a group of retired costumed heroes living in an alternate 1985 where Nixon is still president and fear of nuclear doomsday permeates the air. When a hero named the Comedian (an excellent Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is murdered, his former colleague--the unhinged, masked Rorschach (a perfectly creepy Jackie Earle Hayley)--begins investigating who is behind the death. The other masked crimefighters--Silk Spectre 2 (Malin Ackerman), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), Nite Owl 2 (Patrick Wilson), and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a godlike being who is the only one with actual superpowers--soon learn that there may be a plot to rid the world of their kind. Snyder?s previous work in action (300) and horror (DAWN OF THE DEAD) proves to be preparation for this visually stunning film. The fight sequences are fantastically shot by director of photography Larry Fong, and the action can alternately make viewers hold their breaths at its composition or gasp at the shocking violence. Most will agree that WATCHMEN is not a comic book movie for kids: there?s sex and violence aplenty, but it truly makes itself a film for adults with its smart, complex storytelling.

	Jackie Earle Haley
	Malin Akerman
	Patrick Wilson
	Billy Crudup
	Jeffrey Dean Morgan
	Carla Gugino
	Matthew Goode
	Stephen McHattie
	Alan Moore - Source Writer
	Dave Gibbons - Source Writer
	Lawrence Gordon - Producer
	Larry Fong - Director of Photography
	Thomas Tull - Executive Producer
	Alex McDowell - Production Designer
	Lloyd Levin - Producer
	Michael Wilkinson - Costume Designer
	Herbert W. Gains - Executive Producer
	Tyler Bates - Composer
	William Hoy - Editor
	Deborah Snyder - Producer
	Alex Tse - Screenwriter
	David Hayter - Screenwriter
	Zack Snyder - Director

Box Office
3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[Snyder is] tremendous at directing action....The Comedian's deadly opening sequence is a masterpiece of fight choreography..." 02/26/2009

Variety
"Whether it's Dreiberg's flying owl ship or the staggering glass palace Dr. Manhattan conjures up on Mars, the filmmakers have spared no expense in their mission to visualize every frame." 02/26/2009

Premiere
4 stars out of 4 -- "The film really does the graphic novel justice....The music is perfect....Snyder did a great job creating a film that's loyal to both the source material and his own style." 02/27/2009

Chicago Sun-Times
4 stars out of 4 -- "[A] compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel." 03/04/2009

Wall Street Journal
"[T]he production as a whole is impressive. So is the eclectic soundtrack, which ranges from Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon." 03/06/2009

Entertainment Weekly
"[A] teemingly ambitious, jam-packed movie....The opening-credit sequence has a marvelous audacity, as it packs in the story of how the Minutemen -- masked crime fighters of the 1940s -- gave rise to their more nihilistic counterparts in the '50s." 03/13/2009

Rolling Stone
"[There are] flashes of visual brilliance and performances, especially from Haley and Crudup, that drill deep into the novel's haunted soul." 03/19/2009

Total Film
4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] labour-of-love, epic, stylish, violent and very, very faithful....Even under a luminous layer of CG muscle, Billy Crudup's beautifully subtle performance hides electric flickers of pain in the impressive face of quantum superman Dr. Manhattan." 04/01/2009

ReelViews 7 of 10
Transforming Watchmen, one of the most lauded comic series of all time, into a movie is as ambitious an undertaking as anyone in Hollywood is likely to attempt. For more than 20 years, a variety of people (including Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass) have been involved and all have backed off when faced with the enormity of the task. The team to finally get it done is headed by 300 director Zack Snyder. Whether Watchmen will become known as "Snyder's Folly" remains to be seen. Snyder may have replicated the narrative faithfully (with the exception of a change to a climactic plot device) and re-created the dark look of the comic books, but the nuances are gone. The film is too busy, too narratively dense, and too awkwardly structured for it to achieve the level of absorption that one can get from reading the books...From a visual and stylistic standpoint, Watchmen develops a gloomy, paranoid atmosphere, but doesn't overplay it. There are also fewer flourishes than one might expect from the man behind 300. Compared to that film, this one appears almost conventional...Watchmen isn't brain-dead, and that's a good thing. In fact, the opposite is true. But the film, as pregnant with ideas as it may be, has trouble standing on its own, and for a movie that's opening in thousands of theaters, that's a problem. For the Watchmen fan, this may be as close to the Holy Grail as a motion picture could come. For everyone else, a sense of frustration and disappointment is not unwarranted. Watchmen is many things but it is not the Next Great Comic Book Movie or the film that will advance graphic novel adaptations to the next level. - James Berardinelli

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
"Watchmen" focuses on the contradiction shared by most superheroes: They cannot live ordinary lives but are fated to help mankind. That they do this with trademarked names and appliances goes back to their origins in Greece, where Zeus had his thunderbolts, Hades his three-headed dog, and Hermes his winged feet. Could Zeus run fast? Did Hermes have a dog? No...That level of symbolism is coiling away beneath all superheroes. What appeals with Batman is his humanity; despite his skills, he is not supernormal. "Watchmen" brings surprising conviction to these characters as flawed and minor gods, with Dr. Manhattan possessing access to godhead on a plane that detaches him from our daily concerns -- indeed, from days themselves. In the film's most spectacular scene, he is exiled to Mars, and in utter isolation reimagines himself as a human, and conjures (or discovers? I'm not sure) an incredible city seemingly made of crystal and mathematical concepts. This is his equivalent to 40 days in the desert, and he returns as a savior...The film is rich enough to be seen more than once. I plan to see it again, this time on IMAX, and will have more to say about it. I'm not sure I understood all the nuances and implications, but I am sure I had a powerful experience. It's not as entertaining as "The Dark Knight," but like the "Matrix" films, LOTR and "The Dark Knight," it's going to inspire fevered analysis. I don't want to see it twice for that reason, however, but mostly just to have the experience again. - Roger Ebert