With the fanboy community in a tizzy over the upcoming release of Watchmen (Ain’t It Cool News alone has published three rave reviews), it has remained to be seen what the “normal” critics would think of film. But today the Hollywood trade papers Variety and The Hollywood Reporter went live with their reviews — and both of them are negative.
From THR:
[Director Zack] Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse never find a reason for those unfamiliar with the graphic novel to care about any of this nonsense. And it is nonsense. When one superhero has to take a Zen break, he does so on Mars. Of course he does…Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009.
Variety is more charitable, but its main point is just as much of a downer:
[T]he movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there’s simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated. As “Watchmen” lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn’t happen in the novel: Wavering in tone between seriousness and camp, and absent the cerebral tone that gave weight to some of the book’s headier ideas, the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.
The box office remains a massive question mark: on the one hand, it’s a heavily hyped superhero movie — and on the other, most people don’t know anything about it, it’s rated R, and it’s more than two and a half hours long. How much will bad reviews dissuade people from spending their money?
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