Review of “Watchmen”

After seeing the trailer to “Watchmen” I was hyped up long before it was released, I decided to go see it .  I’d had no previous exposure to the story.  Everything I knew about Watchmen was what I saw in the trailer.  Except that it was directed by Zack Snyder who directed 300….a movie which I thought was really good.   “Cool,” I thought, “a sort of dark-anti-super-hero movie adapted from a graphic novel I never read.”

Knowing nothing about the movie, but noticing the excitement in my voice each time I reminded her that the movie was opening this weekend, Kelly reluctantly agreed to go.  We went to the 3:20 showing at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks.  We had some chili cheese fries and a pizza and settled in to watch a movie that looked like it had potential to be really good.  After all, it made $25M the first day, and according to reviews on IMDB.com 17,000 people gave it an average of 8.3 /10

The first scene was, by far, the best scene in the movie.  It was a really cool fight scene between a retired super-hero and an assassin trying to kill him.  Everything up until the opening credits rolled was cool.  It just went downhill from there.  We were completely bored and disinterested after about 20 minutes in to the movie.  There was long drawn out back story establishing the setting and how the characters once lived and what led them to what they are now.  Its about an alternate 1985 where the US and Russia are on the brink of nuclear war, Nixon is on his 5th presidential term, and super-heroes that don’t have any powers except martial arts skills, run around in stupid costumes not solving crime.

It dove deeply in to all the characters’ pasts but there wasn’t any thing going on.  Kelly looked at me several times during the movie and said, “really?”   The whole movie is long and dull marked with little bits of surprising explosive violence.  There’s barely any meaningful conflict that had anything to do with the story until the last part of the movie.  But after about 30 minutes you don’t really care what happens to the characters or this alternate history.  This movie was a waste of 2 hours and 43 minutes and $14.