I blame Sin City.  Thanks to the success of that film, an awful lot of people who really should know better seem to have gotten it into their heads that the key to a successful comic book adaptation is to just use the source material as storyboards and make the screen look exactly like the page.  Guess what, they're wrong.  The page and the screen are different mediums with different rules that demand different approaches.

Too bad nobody told Watchmen director Zak Snyder.

On the plus side, Snyder's take on the classic graphic novel - widely considered one of the best ever written - is a stunning thing to look at, a visual beast of a film chock full of eye candy of the absolute highest order.  So full marks there, Zak, you can shoot a pretty picture.  And for that matter you can pace one hell of a film, too, the lengthy two hours and forty minutes zipping by so quickly that it feels significantly shorter.  So again, high marks for you.

But then there's the down side. And it's pretty sizable. Watchmen the movie lives so firmly in the shadow of Watchmen the graphic novel that Snyder seems to have spent far too much time trying to recreate specific panels from the book and far too little time paying attention to his actors' performances and the flow of the narrative, leading to a film that is overly and unnecessarily complicated in structure with no room whatsoever for the sort of on-set happy accidents that breathe life into the characters, resulting in a film that is technically proficient but just cold, cold, cold on the human level,. And ironically for a film that follows the source material so slavishly for the huge bulk of the run time the one point where Snyder opts to vary significantly - the squidless ending - is exactly the point that will most infuriate fans of the original material.

Watchmen was meant to be the first big tentpole film of the year, the big bankable blockbuster that would get 2009 rolling in style. And, honestly, as a fan of the source material I really, really wanted it to be. But it's not. It's just not. It's not a bad film but it is pretty deeply flawed, a complex and messy picture that lacks the heart and the clarity to draw in audiences who weren't already familiar with the graphic novel. Expect a big opening weekend followed by a steep decline, and deservedly so on both counts.