Watchmen
After reading and hearing from all the comicbook fanboys wanking over the impending movie, I thought it may be worth a look. I saw it at the video store and picked it up out of the dozens of copies still there (should’ve been foreshadowing on my part). Now, I knew this wouldn’t be a typical superhero movie, like Batman or Spiderman. I expected to see some kind of film noir espousing the foibles and trials of being a superhero. I liked the alternate time line, the beginning montages were awesome, fight scene right at the beginning seemed to set the tone.
I was wrong. It sucked.
Dr. Manhattan needed about ten thousand LESS lines. Every single one of his lines was about how his god-dom was irrelevant to the human race. OK. WE GET IT. You don’t care fine! Go get therapy or go live on Mars in your stupid Fortress Clock Of Solitude. Seriously WTF was the point of that? OH boo hoo he broke up with his girlfriend and went to Mars to cry and slit his wrists! Then he kidnaps her and drones on some more about his ‘feelings’. “Can’t you just tell me how all this ends and save us the time?” the Jupiter asks Big Blue impatiently. At that point, she was reading my thoughts exactly. I know SOMEone is going to mention the blue wang, so I’m just doing it now and getting it over with.
Ozymandias was the ‘here’s the twist!’ villain. So Night Owl and Rorschach spend 15 minutes trying to kick his ass in his Egyptian Fortress of Solitude, then he blows up NY, and now they’re all ‘welp, that’s it. gg I guess.’ Then they stand around talking about it! uh, what? If anything you should want to take him out even more, he just killed millions of people!
Rorschach seemed to be the only character that actually stayed focused on what it’s like to be a superhero. He had a mission and stuck with it. Even he knew he was a bit of a loon, but he accepted that. Except for the very end when he inexplicably asked Dr. Manhattan to blow him up. Huh? He was the only character we seemed to get to know on the inside. To see how he was thinking. The rest of them were just blah.
Switching back and forth between protagonist stories was jarring at times, confusing at others. It was like there were four or possibly five movies going at once, but split up and mixed in all together.
Granted, I haven’t read the comic book(and here’s where The Comic Book Guys just smirk and say “then you just don’t underSTAND, man!”) but a multi million dollar movie should at least make sense to people who haven’t seen it.
If I’ve ruined this movie for anyone planning to see it, I’m not sorry. Biggest waste of $5 and three hours of my life since I rented “There Will Be Blood”. Now THAT was a movie I didn’t even bother watching all the way through.
