It's hardly a whitewash. If anything it luxuriates in the violence and grit, in some ways a response to our desensitization to such.
What dooms the movie from a film sense according to my learned colleagues is a lack of human connection with the characters. You do not care about them, or what happens to them. If, as I do, you cared about the characters in Watchmen after reading, then you do not have this first problem.
The second thing that dooms it is that the plot is told as a comic book plot (not in the simplistic sense, but in the convoluted continuity sense). One of those comic book *stories* is really just an outgrowth of the fertile soil of years and years of continuity. Crisis on Infinite Earths would have made NO SENSE if it was just plopped in your lap.
You need to know the origin stories, you need to know the historical record, you need to know how things changed and how they got that way, as APFox says -- you need to understand what this universe reads at newsstands and is in the mind of it's Moores (Tales of the Black Freighter). It's a lot of additional fancruft that belabors and extends the film and feels like intense domino setting, like making the components of an intricate clockwork mechanism. But it makes the story feel like nothing is happening, that nothing did happen, that the entire story is being told in flashback and no one is really doing anything.
What dooms the movie from a film sense according to my learned colleagues is a lack of human connection with the characters. You do not care about them, or what happens to them. If, as I do, you cared about the characters in Watchmen after reading, then you do not have this first problem.
The second thing that dooms it is that the plot is told as a comic book plot (not in the simplistic sense, but in the convoluted continuity sense). One of those comic book *stories* is really just an outgrowth of the fertile soil of years and years of continuity. Crisis on Infinite Earths would have made NO SENSE if it was just plopped in your lap.
You need to know the origin stories, you need to know the historical record, you need to know how things changed and how they got that way, as APFox says -- you need to understand what this universe reads at newsstands and is in the mind of it's Moores (Tales of the Black Freighter). It's a lot of additional fancruft that belabors and extends the film and feels like intense domino setting, like making the components of an intricate clockwork mechanism. But it makes the story feel like nothing is happening, that nothing did happen, that the entire story is being told in flashback and no one is really doing anything.
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