Corona | Coming Attractions

The big two industry magazines of show business, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, have both published their reviews for Watchmen.

The Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt is the more negative of the two reviews for the superhero flick. "There is something a little lackadaisical here," he writes. "The set pieces are surprisingly flat and the characters have little resonance. Fight scenes don't hold a candle to Asian action. Even the digital effects are ho-hum. Armageddon never looked so cheesy."

However, it also should be noted that Honeycutt's Watchmen review gets several facts incorrect, such as the name of the superhero group. He also expresses confusion as to why the heroes that are wearing costumes that don't have godlike superpowers like Dr. Manhattan are called "superheroes". Quick, someone tell Batman that he's confusing to people when standing beside Superman!

Justin Chang's review for Variety is more positive but still mixed. While dispensing praise for Snyder's faithfulness to the source material and the pic's editing, "...the 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,| writes Chang." As Watchmen lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn’t happen in the novel: Wavering 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."