This review is very late in coming... I watched Watchmen when I was in San Francisco a month ago. The hotel had it as one of the movies you could rent so I watched it the first night I was in town. With all that happened that week I forgot to post about it.

To start off, the graphic novel that the movie was based on is just amazing. I only read the graphic novel about 1.5-2 years ago when I heard that they were making a movie of it. Rorschach has got to be one of the best anti-hero characters in any kind of super hero based literature. He's coarse, paranoid, delusional, bigoted yet strangely charming. His character translated well to the screen. I know it is just a special effect, but I love how his mask changed. It is almost as if it changed because of the mood, but maybe I am reading too much into it an inkblot. :)

I have to applaud the film makers for not changing the story to fit the times. Yes, 1985 is anachronistic, but on every level it really worked.

Casting wise I think they did a great job, except maybe with Silk Spectre 2. The actress didn't really seem like a kick ass type of girl in the same way Jennifer Garner pulled it off in Alias or Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill. I'd be hard pressed to think of an actress out there who could have replaced her though.

Everyone else was perfectly cast. The Comedian, probably my second favorite character, was straight from the comic. The Vietnam scenes are chilling. The Comedian had a clarity on human nature that showed through. The way he was written, you could understand why a personality like The Comedian played both sides. He wasn't drawn two dimensional in the novel or the movie.

I guess the controversy when the movie was out in the theater was Doctor Manhattan walks around with the full frontal. Maybe it was because I saw the movie on a 35" TV, but that didn't really bother me.

It really is hard to find anything really wrong with the movie. I wish more movies were closer to their source material. Hollywood may find that boring, but a good transfer usually ends up in accentuating the words (and in this case pictures) it is based on.

I give the movie (and the novel) 4 out of 4 stars.