Before I get into the serious review stuff I'd just like to congratulate Tom on his speedy response to my previous post. Elija Wood shall be yours my friend.
Moving on now, the Watchmen. The Watchmen is about a group of vigilante style "superheroes" who are outlawed by the American Government and forced to live out their lives as regular human beings, which you'd think to be relatively easy to do because all of them, bar one, ARE regular human beings. Anyway the year is 1980-something and the doomsday clock is ticking out it's last 10 minutes or so as America aniticipate the onset of nuclear war with Russia. I won't dig too much farther into the extremely involved story because we've got bigger things to discuss. Now overall I liked the Watchmen. I went in expecting a shitty, no-brainer superhero action flick of the Daredevil ilk but instead was treated to one of the grittiest and most tense films I've seen since The Dark Knight. Every one of the heroes is a well developed character with their own flaws and problems to resolve. As heroes they are all morally questionable in some way and as such you're left with a sense of deep running emptiness as you watch these vigilante heroes ruin innocent lives. You can forget about calling Spiderman a conflicted character because he can't balance his real life with his superhero life. Try watching a man who can't bear to be without his mask as he clashes violently with anyone who ticks him off. The effective thing about having such flawed main characters is that not only do you characterise them more strongly but you also end up connecting emotionally with the people they wrong along the way, the everday people.
Having said all that the movie is gritty, heavy and dark to the extreme. I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone, you need to be prepared for it. It's like trying to digest a really good meal without chewing it properly, it's a movie that'll sit heavy in your brain for a good while after watching it. That and it's graphic. There's reasonably explicit sex and some extremely visual violence. If you don't want to see a man have his skull cleavered repeatedly then don't watch this. I thought the soundtrack was pretty solid though, even if it was also unsubtle. I was thankfull that the movie wasn't trying to ram some no-name bands new single down my earhole and instead went with proven rock classics like Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and Jimi Hendrix.
My last issue with the film is that the movie feels as long as it is, which is very. I'm conflicted as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing because on the one hand I didn't feel like there was an abundance of unnescessary bits , in fact there were moments were you got a sense of having missed something. On the other hand it can't be good if I check my watch and say to myself, "it felt much longer than that." The movie is based off a graphic novel of the same name written in the 80's and had quite a bit to fit in and coming from a person who hadn't read the novel I found it coherent and enjoyable, so perhaps the length issue was an inevitable necessity. Every main character has his own tale to tell in the movie and they're all given a fair hunk of time to work with, so I guess that's a good thing. Overall however I find Watchment a hard movie to review. It does so many things really well and does so many new things with the overly formulaic "superhero" genre that I'm tempted to call it a must see. Unfortunately the gritty and violent nature of the film makes it unsettling and will probably alienate certain people. It's a powerful film that challenges the superhero ideology and the black and white nature of the superhero genre, but it's also likely to divide audiences.
