"Watchmen," round 1.

By David Hudson on 02/25/2009

[Updated through 2/27]

At Hitfix, Drew McWeeny recalls visiting "Paul Greengrass in London to see how development on 'Watchmen' was going." The cast was stellar; Paramount launched an official site. "This was after Darren Aronofsky had already come and gone. And sure enough... it fell apart." But now he's seen the "Watchmen" that actually got made. Twice. "The first viewing was pretty much two hours and 45 minutes of me shouting inside my own head 'OHMYGOD, IT'S WATCHMEN!' over and over and over.... The second viewing, I was over the shock. I sat down to watch it as a movie, as something that has to live on its own now, something that has to play for noobs and the faithful alike. And taken on its own, Zack Snyder's 'Watchmen' is a profound work of art, a beautiful, deliriously weird, meditative spin on a genre that is as American as jazz. It is adult, sober-minded entertainment, visually ravishing and loaded with more ideas with a typical Oscar-season, and even when it doesn't work..., the ambition and the density of it is breathtaking."

"'Watchmen' is a near 3-hour-long adaptation of one of the most dense and layered stories in the history of comic books," writes Quint in a spoiler-laced review at AICN. "It's a $100 million R-rated studio picture that keeps almost everything that people have been saying for two decades now would never ever make it into a movie. The gore, graphic violence, graphic sex, the comic's structure, the foul language, the bleak ending, a main villain that is possibly the hero of the book depending on how you look at things, the blue genitalia and the overall grayness of character all survive in the context of what the book demands: an epic spectacle."

More from Harry Knowles, who just yesterday rounded up half a dozen or so early reviews, including Ian Nathan's for Empire: "Snyder has caught the novel's provocative mindset. Fundamentally, [Alan] Moore was asking how a universe of costumed crime fighters might actually work. A quest borrowed by [Christopher] Nolan for his Batman rethink. Here, though, there is dark satire."

Also yesterday: Wired's "Watchmen" package.

Update: Kevin Maher of the London Times finds "Watchmen" to be "a mesmerising and brutalising experience, and will be, for some at least, more than worth the wait.... Along the way, limbs are broken, bones are smashed and skulls split as the film earns its unprecedented 18 certificate (the supposedly ultraviolent 'Dark Knight' was a 12A).... On the downside, the deadly serious nature of the project only highlights the many titter-inducing splashes of camp... But as the first attempt to make a truly post-adolescent comic book movie, 'Watchmen' is, literally, peerless." Via Lou Luminick.

Updates, 2/26: "'Watchmen' is less a fully realized comicbook epic than a sturdy feat of dramatic compression," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "Fans of Alan Moore's landmark graphic novel, concerning a ring of Gotham superheroes brought out of retirement by an impending nuclear threat, will thrill to every pulpy line of dialogue and bloody act of retribution retained in director Zack Snyder's slavishly faithful adaptation. But auds unfamiliar with Moore's brilliantly bleak, psychologically subversive fiction may get lost amid all the sinewy exposition and multiple flashbacks."

"Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse never find a reason for those unfamiliar with the graphic novel to care about any of this nonsense," writes Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter. "And it is nonsense.... There is something a little lackadaisical here. The set pieces are surprisingly flat and the characters have little resonance. Fight scenes don't hold a candle to Asian action. Even the digital effects are ho-hum. Armageddon never looked so cheesy.... Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009."

The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik: "Brooding, dark and far too sincere for its own good (note extended voiceovers about heroism and loneliness, not to mention a whole counterfactual element in which the US wins Vietnam and Richard Nixon is elected to five terms), what could have been a moral fable in superhero clothes (i.e., 'The Dark Knight') is instead a sloppy stew of vigilante justice, techno-musings and pop social philosophy."

Update, 2/27: "[T]ry as he might, Snyder can't sabotage the sheer majesty of the source material," writes Tom Huddleston in Time Out London. "The breadth and grandeur of Moore's globe-spanning narrative still astounds, and to see [Dave] Gibbons's iconic images writ vast and messy across the screen packs an undeniable sentimental punch.... Neophytes should probably steer clear, but for longterm fans of the source work this will be a hugely pleasurable, if ultimately unenlightening experience."

[Photo: "Watchmen," Warner Bros, 2009]

Tags: Alan Moore, Watchmen, Zack Snyder