The Watchmen

My wife and I haven't been to a movie in a long time at a theater. So this past week seemed to be a good occasion to visit the local Cinema 20 plus complex. The Watchmen was there, which I assumed was a movie about crime-fighting super-heroes that evaporated the bad guys with their other-worldly super powers. Boy was I wrong.


To tell you the truth, I'm not at all sure what the movie was about. It was sort of a bleak film noir. The story was narrated by a guy named Rorschach that wears a white sack over his noggin that has Rorschach images fade and change shapes.

The story line is about some super-heroes from the 1940's that got old and quit to have kids, get jobs or become alcoholics and worse.

The new group of Super guys and girls that took over includes some of their offspring, except for Rorschach and the Blue Guy.

It is sort of a what-if film.

As, what if America won the Viet Nam war because they had a secret weapon that was a giant Blue Guy with super powers and Nixon was elected over and over again as president.

Now I can handle over-gratuitous violence in a movie. Most war, space, super-hero etc. movies are full of computer aided graphically enhanced violence which we are conditioned to and come to expect.

What I can't handle is two-hours of watching some well proportioned Blue naked guy with his schwanstuker exposed throughout most of the movie. This has burned a vision in my brain. Mommy please make it go away! The character called Dr. Manahattan would be more aptly named Dr. Johnson.

He wore a posing pouch while defeating the Vietnamese. He wore a suit at other public events. So where is the blurry thing or the black sensor box? I demand a blurry thingie or a sensor box.

The film had some excellent music from the 1960-1970's. It also had some news footage of the Watts race riots and a re-enactment of the Kent State massacre.

In my opinion this is a very long, extremely long, lengthy, did I say long, preachy movie which would have been much better if they spent a few more dollars on costumes.

This is definitely not a movie for children.