Finally got around to seeing the film now that it's out on DVD, and frankly I'm glad we didn't hire a babysitter so we could go see it in the theater. The opening credit sequence is outstanding; it both looks great and gives you snapshots of the Watchmen's alternate Earth history. I was into it for the first half hour or so, and then it begins to lose steam, and by the hour mark I'm glancing at the time and wondering why they've added scenes of Nixon's war room and seem to have added a subplot in which the U.S. is going to make a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR. There's already more material in the comic book than you can fit into a 2 1/2 hour movie. We'll go back to Val Goldman's advice to the Goldman Girls in the Birdcage when they're redecorating the place for Senator Keeley's visit: "Don't add; just subtract!" Tweaking in the name of clarity for the viewer (especially with the viewer who is unfamiliar wit the comic) is fine; while I liked the alien Veidt built in the comics, I'm cool with the changes there. I have more problems with Rorschach spending a single day in jail because they've compressed the timeline too much; I have serious problems with adding subplots that don't contribute to the story.
In my personal notes after first reading the comic I wrote: "The medium is used to great effect in the telling of Dr. Manhattan's backstory, which is told from in a thematic, rather than chronological, succession of images/text that would be bulky in purely written form and possibly too jarring in a motion picture." They tried their best in the film (and Billy Crudup is great in anything), but it's still better in the comic. That really goes for everything about the film.
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