Who Watched the Watchers?

The field of movie releases in March was pretty sparse. One movie that looked interesting was Watchmen. I’m not into comics and I’m not much of a Frank Miller fan. I do enjoy a good superhero movie. I was surprised that this movie was Rated ‘R’. My teenage kids had heard that the movie was ‘gross’. Despite all these strikes I went to see it with a couple of buddies. Just finding a theater where it was still playing was a challenge. Because of its length the showtime was weird too. I managed to find a 6pm showing. The plot was not nearly as complicated as the press had made it out to be. The movie is gratuitously violent. There were several scenes that were very uncomfortable to watch. The movie was full of nudity — the blue Dr. Manhattan walks around nude for most of the move only occasionally donning a codpiece. I’m sure that’s what the teenagers called gross.

The visuals of the movie were good. I liked the 1985 references. The Nixon in office for 5 terms was a bit much but it drove home the alternate universe theme. The Kennedy assassination scene was kind of pointless. The big villain at the climax of the movie did not seem menacing compared to the “good guys”.

In the end the movie had more negatives than positives. I expect it to live on in DVD as a sort of 3-hour long cult film akin Heavy Metal but never will it be a commercial success. There were just too many mistakes in the execution that pushed too far.