Did The Watchmen Movie Work?

I've already posted my initial review of the film over at The Studio Has A Few Notes. I gave it 3 and a half stars out of 4, which is certainly not a bad score by any means. But that was my reaction to it, coming at it from a very specific perspective: how much did it live up to my expectations, based on a fairly thorough familiarity with the original source material.

What about those who went into it cold? Did most walk out confused or disappointed (considering the hype that had built up around it over the past month)? Or did they have a hoot and want to go back and see it a second time?

I've read some reviews that suggest that the plot doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's hard for me to rationalize because I personally thought that, if anything, it was dumbed down for a movie audience. Let's see if I can recap it, at a high level, without drawing on anything that wasn't on the screen (or giving away any major spoilers):

• The main story's set in 1985 on an Earth where Nixon's still president and the U.S. won the Vietnam War thanks to a superpowered blue guy named Dr Manhattan who vapourized the Viet Cong just by pointing at them
• Because the U.S. has Dr Manhattan and the Soviet Union doesn't, the USSR is building up a huge cache of nuclear weapons and rattling their sabres by invading Afghanistan (causing fears to mount that World War III is imminent)
  
• Somebody's apparently killing masked vigilantes, even ones that had been forced into retirement because of a law passed in 1977 banning them from operating
• The aforementioned Dr Manhattan leaves Earth in a huff after allegations are made that he unwittingly gave those closest to him cancer
• The only remaining vigilante operating outside the law, Rorschach, tries to investigate the murder of another hero (The Comedian) but in the process gets framed for a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison (where many of the convicts hate him because he put them there)
• Two retired heroes, Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre (each the second to bear those names), decide to come out of retirement, bust Rorschach out of the stir, and determine who's doing the killing before they're knocked off themselves
• The climax brings all of those pieces together, along with a few more, and reveals who was doing the killing, why, and how

I don't know... that doesn't really read like an enigma wrapped in a puzzle to me. But then again, some people complained that Pulp Fiction and Memento were impenetrable to them, in terms of plot, and I thought each was relatively easy to follow. Watchmen certainly isn't as accessible as, say, a typical action flick.

Another complaint I've heard is that there are too many characters, and too many flashbacks. That one I can see somewhat. In the comic series, Moore and Gibbons were generally pretty careful about how they introduced new cast members, typically providing either a bridging (existing) character as the reader's entryway or through the use of (unclunky) expository dialogue. Movements through time were often accomplished by tricks like repeating the same shot of a particular face over two panels, but with the backdrop changing from one to the next. That's something that you can do quite economically in a comic format (for the cost of two panels on pages that typically had nine of them) but I'm not sure from my single viewing whether it was carried forward into the movie. I do remember following the timeline quite easily, even back in 1986, but then again: with a comic, you can flip back to earlier pages quite easily, whereas you don't have that VCR-like capability as a theatre audience member. Perhaps, like some of the best films, repeated viewings are really required to slide every single piece into place in your head, but was it really that difficult the first time through to follow what was going on well enough to avoid getting lost? I'm the wrong one to judge.

Finally, there's been great concern in the comic blogosphere that Watchmen demands a thorough familiarity with the genre in order to understand, on account of it being essentially a deconstruction of that artform. On this one, I have to call, "Bullshit!" As with the comic itself, there are various degrees of entertainment and satisfaction that can be derived from the work, and not everyone's going to come away with all of them (or even most of them). That's true of lots of great works of art, though. I can appreciate the Mona Lisa as a layman of the fine arts (and I have, each time I've seen it) but I do so even without the advantage of seeing it through the eyes of someone more attuned to that sort of thing. In the same way, I think there's a straight-forward story involving men and women in tights that anyone with a pulse should be able to enjoy in Watchmen. If you don't get many of its subtler visual references because you're never read a Golden Age or Silver Age comic, that's OK; if you don't recognize Rorschach as a commentary on the thin line between various forms of mental illness that many of the Batman-like superheroes have always walked, you don't have to; and if Dr Manhattan seems like just a weird bald guy with a blue dong who's got some amazing powers, you still picked up enough to "get" it. Sure, there's lots more going on than that, but so what? To some people, Romeo & Juliet's just a play about a couple of mixed up teenagers. There's nothing wrong with that. As long as it tells you a story and you get something out of it, you got your money's worth.

Having said all that, I'd most definitely love to hear from some of the readers of this blog - especially those who've never read the comic - as to how the film played for them.