Here's my review that I've written of Watchmen (vs The Dark Knight)
***
Seriously, my world just turned upside down. Early in the year I forced myself to sit through Christopher Nolan’s painful but much hyped follow-up to the dreadfully mediocre Batman Begins. You know Christopher Nolan, the guy who made the brilliant and ambitious movie, Memento, following it with one of the decade’s smartest American movies, The Prestige. As a Batman fan, sitting through The Dark Knight was a physically painful affair: dire, clichéd rubbish, an overly traditional man vs terrorist setup soaked to the brim in an unquestioning philosophy a mile or two to the right of Ann Coulter. The film’s parallels between the Joker and Al Qaeda were painfully obvious, and Batman’s “by any means necessary” method simply turned the character into an unthinking Jack Bauer and the movie into an apology for the Bush regime. None of this is helped by its traditional, laboured A to B blockbuster structure, which constantly eschews things like characterization and thoughtfulness, instead willing us to leave our brains at home and enjoy the high octane action. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional thrill ride, but Batman’s tired car chases and fuzzy fight scenes don’t try very hard to offer anything new or creative.
After this, I did not approach the big screen adaptation of Watchmen with enthusiasm. The fact that it was to be directed by Zack Snyder was certainly a factor, since his directorial efforts up to this point had been an indifferent, watered down remake of a Romero movie and 300, a movie so awful in every sense of the word that the English language has no expletives strong enough to describe it. Not content to bask in the glories of its technical incompetence, its atrocious acting, its chronically retarded slo-mo sequences and an eye-bleedingly revolting CGI colour palette, 300 has to be one of the most offensive works ever to hit the silver screen.
No, I was not really looking forward to seeing Snyder’s massacre of Alan Moore’s revered graphic novel, Watchmen. But the hype machine, that sinister engine, somehow managed to arouse my curiosity to head to the cinema, bracing myself for an evening full of either pointing and laughing at the screen or cringing and wailing in despair. I was somewhat surprised, then, to find that the movie’s first scene gripped me by the throat , shoved me into a car, then sped me off on a rollercoaster ride lasting what felt like a very short two hours and forty minutes. Quite simply, I was putty in Snyder’s unclean hands, and by the time I left the theatre, I was convinced that Watchmen was one of the most important American films of the decade.
http://www.playtime-magazine.com/2009/03/watchmen-vs-the-dark-knight/
Watchmen
Team » Watchmen appears in 44 issues.
Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins. The grouping of heroes and villains contained in the work are not, in fact, named "The Watchmen", though they were at one point referred to as "Crimebusters". Rorschach, Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan were the team's primary heroes.
Watchmen vs The Dark Knight
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