Is Zack Snyder's Watchmen a Failure?

I’m becoming increasingly worried. I’d always had worries about Snyder, who managed to make the should’ve-been-awesome 300 and turn it into something ridiculous at best, and more often than not, unbearable. But everything I’d seen and heard until recently had me tentatively excited. Now, the first clips have started popping up online, and they’re dull, flat, and unengaging. The one action scene we see appears to be a student film by a some raver who just saw The Matrix for the first time. And this review at Hollywood Elsewhere pretty much confirms everything I’d worried about, calling the film a “staggering failure.”

I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m still rooting for it to succeed, of course, if only because Alan Moore’s original graphic novel is legitimately one of the best graphic novels ever, and one of the more ambitious and rewarding pieces of pop art in the last thirty years — and it deserves better.