6 Reasons Why "Watchmen" Fails

The Playlist has posted a well reasoned and excellently written piece listing the 6 reasons why Watchmen fails in a post-Dark Knight landscape.

Silk Spectre and Night Owl share an intimate moment, as their film collapses around them.

Every point really hits the nail on the head, but point 4 really gets to the nitty gritty of one of the overarching problems I had with the film - its sheer irrelevance:

4. The 80s Are Cornball:
Another inherent problem -- and surely fans will be appalled at this notion -- is that the "Watchmen" story is dated. Written in '85 and published in '86, the story is almost 25 years old and was always meant to be an allegory for the Regan/Thatcher Orwellian 1984 years of conservative fear mongering and nuclear cold war disquietude. But by refusing to update it in any manner - the high fidelity of dogged literalness - there is zero contemporary connection to ground it or make it feel honest. Snyder skates by with vaguely similar fumes of 9/11, but none of that resonates in any deep manner, even if there are shots of the WTC twin towers still standing. Just having them there isn't enough and that empty gesture is indicative of a lot of the creative choices in the film.

I never got past the feeling that the film's themes really had no relevance to modern day. Not anymore at least. It seems wholly out of sync with the times, its message a nihilistic relic of a not so distant past. Perhaps if it had been released 5 years ago...but no. That's not saying anything about the quality, which as the article rightly points out, is goofy and scattershot.

I really don't want to think about this movie anymore.