While I am waiting for my honey-rosemary bread to bake, I am going to tell you about Watchmen.

Angela and I went to see this highly anticipated (at least by nerds) movie adaptation of Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel Watchmen, the only graphic novel to appear on Time magazine's 2005 list of Top 100 Novels of All Time.

A little history: In 1985, right about when the "kitschy" era of comics was drawing to a close, Alan Moore set about to create a sort of alternate universe Earth, where costumed superheroes were a reality. Consequently, Alan Moore's superheroes of Watchmen were not immune to the brutal events of the 20th century, and find themselves embroiled in Vietnam, homophobia, the Cold War, and the kind of real-world mortality that DC and Marvel superheroes often seemed to avoid (one historic Watchmen character is shot by bank robbers when his cape becomes entangled in a revolving door).

The plot of Watchmen is incredibly complicated and intricate, involving a couple of subplots which serve as foils for the main plot. As such, it has long been considered "unfilmable". To further complicate matters, the author, Alan Moore, is a bit of an anti-authority crackpot. Though to his credit, he is a genius writer, and many of his best graphic novels (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) have been butchered by Hollywood.

Regrettably, critics of the Watchmen movie are bitterly divided. The film stands at about 65% at Rotten Tomatoes. I have to admit that I feel a lot of these critics simply don't "get" Watchmen. The graphic novel is very much a reactionary work: it hammers the final nail in the coffin of the happy-go-lucky era of superhero comics where everything always turns out OK and nothing is ever morally ambiguous. Watchmen the novel, along with other works such as Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, changed the face of comics for the next 20 years. The filmgoing public however has already been exposed to Christopher Nolan's Batman films and the politically-charged X-Men series. So the it's very hard to fully appreciate the movie without considering the novel, and thus parsing the film in a semi-historical, cultural context.

As a fan of the novel, I'm going to say the the movie was an excellent distillation of the graphic novel's main themes. I particularly enjoyed the acting of Patrick Wilson (as Nite Owl II), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (the Comedian), Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) and even the much decried Matthew Goode (Ozymandias). Zack Snyder managed to hold back his Snyderisms enough so that the movie didn't feel like 300 or Sin City (which are fine on their own, but do not embody cinematic styles that would be good for Watchmen).

Watchmen, as a film, was exactly what I was hoping for. It is by no means a replacement for the novel (in my opinion, no film version of a book should ever try to be). It distils the plot without losing the essential elements, and adds a couple of things without losing the spirit of the story. I won't spoil too much, but the opening titles contain a great history montage of Watchmen's earth, with important events involving costumed heroes and/or famous real-world events occurring differently. Any complaints the die-hards have (with one major exception) will likely be rectified in the Director's Cut of the film on DVD, which will probably include a lot of deleted scenes and the "Tales of the Black Freighter" subplot interspersed throughout the film.

For the die-hard, the Watchmen film probably isn't Watchmen-like enough. For older film critics, Watchmen will likely seem alien and inflexible. For discerning geeks such as myself, the film adaptation of Watchmen was just about right, and I applaud the job done by all involved.

:)