TDK was a vastly superior movie, though it definitely had its own faults. I finally watched Watchmen last night and left pretty disappointed.
Acting - Both movies had their ups and downs but overall, I give the nod to TDK. There were no glaring weaknesses in that film and Ledger gave an incredible performance. Bale and Eckhart were good to great, depending on the scene. Watchmen had some great performances (Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan? I never would have picked it but it worked) but it also had some pretty lackluster ones (Silk Spectre II was a cardboard cutout with boobies and Rorschach's raspy voice was comical at points).
Dialogue - The Watchmen was all over the place here. Where they used Moore's dialogue, it worked well. But there were incredibly awkward moments where I almost burst into laughter during crucial points of the movie. Neither movie really shined in this department.
Action - TDK, all the way. 100%. Snyder just couldn't resist turning Watchmen into a craptastic action movie for nearly half an hour. Slow motion shots, cheesy techno music, over-the-top violence for no reason. I'm all for violence but after awhile, the audience gets the point. You don't need to keep grossing them out time after time. The action scenes butchered this movie. Absolutely terrible. It's not a typical superhero movie and those scenes disjointed the entire effect the rest of the movie was having on me. Half an hour after a rape scene, I don't want to see guys in tights dance-fighting in slow motion. Wrong.
Music - Watchmen had a cool idea with the soundtrack, but the implementation felt all wrong. I like almost all the music used in the film (barring the shit techno music) but very little of it felt appropriate to the scene and often detracted from the visuals happening on screen. I wanted to tear my hair out when Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah was used during that joke of a sex scene. Beautiful song, beautiful scene (in the novel), just didn't work under Snyder's direction. And what the hell was up with them using so many classic rock songs in a movie set in 1985?
I loved the first half of Watchmen. It was pretty true to the source material and the Comedian was spot-on. It was going for a great vibe and then the action started happening, turning it into an entirely different film that brutally reminded me that the guy who brought us 300 directed this movie. It was as if after two hours of building drama and characterization, he couldn't resist busting out his Michael Bay handbook on how to ruin a movie through unnecessary action and went with that for half an hour. It killed the experience. The rooftop rescue scene almost made me get up and leave, it was that bad.
As an overall experience, it's a decent movie. It could have been better under a less rigidly stylistic director, IMO. One thing that deserves note is the script and plot by David Hayter. While things were changed, I don't feel they really detracted from the story and overall, the dialogue was good to passable.
Either way, it had a long way to go before it would have dethroned TDK as the best superhero movie ever in my book. I doubt I would even rate it higher than Iron Man, thanks to RDJ's performance in that film.
PS. The blue penis thing was tired by hour two. After awhile, it just became an audience distraction. Yes, I know it's truer to the source material. Yes, I know it's truer to the character. It still doesn't work. Put some shorts on the guy already. A few blue junk shots and the audience would have gotten the point.
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