Watchmen: Chapter I

I've accused both the Zack Snyder adaptation and the HBO continuation of Alan Moore's Watchmen of missing the point. You may be wondering what exactly it is I'm looking for. The answer is nothing. Pretty much any attempt to adapt this novel is to miss the point (although some adaptations miss the point more than others by trying to make Moore's characters, which serve the argument that IRL masked crimefighters would be a piteous bunch, into legitimately "cool" heroes).

Its cinematic presentation was remarkable precisely because it was a graphic novel -- with angles, match cuts, and "shots" that aren't as striking when they're in, well, an actual film. Moreover, the comic book format was thematically relevant; it allowed you to spend any amount of time on a given page and read the panels in any order you please even as the ending remains the same, not unlike the way the godlike, ultra-powerful nudist Dr. Manhattan perceives time.

Watchmen Chapter 1 translates the intent of the images instead of just their basic appearance -- meaning it's better than the Snyder film in that regard -- but the What If...?-esque cel-shading makes them less than stellar to look at. They're too expressionless to convey either the tragedy of the panels or the "omg so cool and sexy"-ness of Snyder. Even when the images are successful/potent, they're never as creative or purposeful with the colors and framing as Dave Gibbons' artworks.

Last but not least is the voice work, which is good, but as a gigantic fan of the source material, it's hard not to imagine how you "want" these voices to sound.

I know this sort of thing doesn't make a film worse, but this is the kind of movie that you're not gonna watch unless you are, indeed, a gigantic fan of the source material (and likely have those same nitpicks while viewing it). I never got the impression that this film was aiming to introduce new fans to the IP; too many key moments are breezed past. (To put things in perspective: This one crams in more elements from the novel than even the Ultimate Cut of Snyder's Watchmen, yet the full two-parter will be shorter than that film.)