Watchmen: Critic Reviews

Zack Snyder delivers Alan Moore's epic superhero saga to the silver screen with uncompromising vision and adoration.

Watchmen isn't boring, but as a fragmented sci-fi doomsday noir, it remains as detached from the viewer as it is from the zeitgeist.

Zack Snyder's film version of Watchmen is a grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology.

It is dizzy, crazy and quite sexy - when it's not being self-indulgent and pointless. If it doesn't quite hang together or add up, or stick faithfully to the comic-book original, these offences aren't major. What a spectacle.

As the story proceeds, however, it grows plodding, convoluted and forgettable.

Sad to say, the much-anticipated adaptation of the world's most celebrated graphic novel is long, dull and sinks under the weight of its reverence for the original.

Overall, Snyder has given us a Watchmen that's visually faithful to the original to the point of panel-by-panel fetishism, and that may be enough for many members of the cult.

Its failure is one of imagination -- although faithfully approximating Dave Gibbons's original drawings, the filmmakers are unable to teleport themselves to the level of the original concept.

The most pleasant surprise in the movie adaptation of Watchmen is the pop-art fusion set off by placing superheroes in a 'real' world.

The reverence is inert, the violence noxious, the mythology murky, the tone grandiose, the texture glutinous. It's an alternate version of The Incredibles minus the delight.

It should have remained what it was from the start: a masterpiece of vicious Cold War paranoia, completely and gut-churningly rendered on the printed page.

As transferred to the big screen by director Zack Snyder, Watchmen is often visually stunning but also confusing and scattered.

Watchmen is a two-hour, 42 minute ride through a dystopian scape with appropriately twisting and conflicted story lines.

... A bizarrely bleak blockbuster, as director Zack Snyder ("300") turns the rich, revisionist, justly praised, 12-part 1986 comic book into nothing less than an attempt to decode 20th century America through its pop culture and vice-versa.

They've made the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever. But this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Incoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, Watchmen marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go?

Another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie.

Zack Snyder's bloated screen adaptation will go over best with fanboys, fangirls, fanmen and fanwomen who give high marks for slavish fidelity to the source material.

The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.

This movie will shake your windows and rattle your walls. At least it will for a couple of hours, before 40-odd minutes of draggy, comic-book exposition smother the wild, subversive superhero business that came before.

Watchmen bites off more than a single film can chew, and chokes on its gluttony.

Mammoth, mangled, violent, confusing, dazzling, dark, excessive and occasionally brilliant.

A (mostly) faithful re-creation of the comic. But it could have been so much more.

It wasn't that I wasn't engaged in some of the (many) story lines, it's just that there was never enough time spent with any particular one to so as to become emotionally involved ... which seem strange to say about a movie 165 minutes long.

The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated.