This is what I call a movie review!

It's a long one, so I'm going to just put a couple of excerpts here.

The Motion/Captured Review: 'Watchmen'
Posted by Drew McWeeny
http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/2008-12-6-mo....review-watchmen

The second viewing, I was over the shock. I sat down to watch it as a movie, as something that has to live on its own now, something that has to play for noobs and the faithful alike. And taken on its own, Zack Snyder's "Watchmen" is a profound work of art, a beautiful, deliriously weird, meditative spin on a genre that is as American as jazz. It is adult, sober-minded entertainment, visually ravishing and loaded with more ideas with a typical Oscar-season, and even when it doesn't work (one element in particular falls flat, and I'll get into that below), the ambition and the density of it is breathtaking. "Watchmen" will not be the sort of commerical juggernaut that "The Dark Knight" was, but it's a stealth weapon. You'll be feeling the ripples from this one for years to come, and I have no doubt this is ground zero for a wave of filmmakers-to-be who will one day cite this as the moment they realized what they wanted to do with their lives. Although this may not be the comparison Warner's accountants want to hear, I'd say that this is the closest thing to a "Blade Runner" I've seen in recent memory. It's a film that confounds mainstream expectation by design, a film that works as both text and meta-text, and one of the strangest things I've ever seen a major studio release.

~*~*~

And, amazingly, it works as a movie. It has its own rhythm, taking its time to lay out this complicated story, but it constantly delights with details both small and grand, and the cumulative impact is far more emotional than I would have expected. This isn't a case of a film being "good enough," and I'm not "just glad there's some version of it finally." It is a triumph, a movie that amazes on its own terms, and a major jump forward for Snyder as a filmmaker.