Watchmen: Better in almost every way than "The Dark Knight"

[noname2200]

I actually thought the opposite. I love The Dark Knight, and still do: it had good pacing, great action scenes (without being TOO over-the-top), decent dialogue, etc.

Watchmen...my opinion is clouded on that one.

I'm sure that if I had just come in without ever reading the comic, I would have liked it far more than I did. I give the director credit for making a huge step up in quality than his previous movie. And the change to the ending was one that I actually thought was fairly fitting and nicely pulled off; I'd imagine it would have much less of a "we must all band together" effect than the comic's version did, but it was also much less...weird.

The problem I have is that I DID read the comic, and it was just far too superior to the movie in every way for me to like the movie as much as I would have otherwise. The movie, understandably, didn't have the time to devote to each characters' psyche that the comic did, but as a result the impact each character is supposed to have is greatly reduced. The movie tells us nothing about Nite Owl or Jupiter's past, it omits large parts of Rorschach's, Manhattan and Comedian get cut (a bit), and worst of all, Ozymandias is never explained. The last one in particular was too bad, because I felt it was one of the comic's most interesting aspects; Ozymandias is a Good Guy who does a very, very bad thing for something he BELIEVES is correct.

I also understand WHY all the side-characters were completely cut (again, time issues), but that did somewhat weaken the story as a result.

Mostly, though, I think I object to the movie's attitude. The comic doesn't hold your hand and spell things out for you. The movie, by contrast, takes a different attitude towards things, and outright says things that were merely implied in the comic. While I suppose I'm making a mountain out a molehill here, I have to say that I hate that: the comic trusts the reader to read between the lines, while the movie thinks the viewer is too lazy to do so.

Oh yeah, and the action sequences in Watchmen were cheesy. I hate wire-fu with a passion.

Overall, the above post makes it sound like I'm much more down on the movie than I really was. I'd rate it a C+/B-, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much better it was than I was expecting. But it wasn't a fantastic movie in my mind, let alone one as good as The Dark Knight.