Watchmen Just Watchable

The task of putting graphic-novel classic Watchmen onscreen may be more than any filmmaker can handle, critics say—though director Zack Snyder did win over Roger Ebert. Some impressions:

• "Stumbles and sometimes falls on its top-heavy ambitions. But there are also flashes of visual brilliance and performances that drill deep into the novel's haunted soul,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone.

• “There isn't a movie in Watchmen—at least not a really good one. What we get instead is something acceptable but pedestrian, an adaptation that is more a prisoner of its story than the master of it,” notes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.
• “Another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie. I plan to see it again. I’m not sure I understood all the nuances and implications, but I am sure I had a powerful experience. It’s not as entertaining as The Dark Knight, but like the Matrix films, LOTR and The Dark Knight, it’s going to inspire fevered analysis,” writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

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