Watchmen: Movie Review

Travis Air Force Base, California, and other select AAFES theaters were given a special sneak preview of Watchmen, a movie that had been stranded in legal hell for a few months. The anticipation of its release has been since the original graphic novel (written by Alan Moore) in 1986. So yes, people had been waiting for this movie to come alive longer than Axl's "Chinese Democracy". Was it worth the wait? Yes, if you've read the book. If you haven't, go read it first.

For those who haven't, here's a quick plot break down: a group of seriously dysfunctional superheroes had been saving America for decades. They helped win the Vietnam War, a victory so significant that Richard Nixon was voted as Pres five terms straight. Once the war was over, he had no need for these "vigilantes" and disbanded The Watchmen.

Cut to 1985 and these ex heroes are being knocked off one by one, starting with The Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), whose moral axis does not exist. This is all happening as Russia and America are on the brink of nuclear war. Just when the superheroes could stop it, someone starts to get rid of them. Apocalypse, anyone?

Had Watchmen (directed by 300's Zach Snyder) focused on just the plot and the whodunit mystery, it would have been an hour and a half flick with sort of a happy ending. But, just like the graphic novel, there's more to the story. Every hero involved has a sordid past and complicated present and Watchmen spares no minute filling us in, taking the movie to nearly three hours. Many still haven't figured out how to unwind their current non-heroic status. The Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) has a relationship with the most powerful hero, Dr. Manhattan (marvelously played by Billy Crudup and some really good CGI technicians). Yet she has problems connecting with him at a human level. The Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) is afraid to be a hero again. And Rorschach (a grimy Jackie Earl Haley that's far departed from his Bad News Bears days) is an uncompromising, hyper-violent detective out to save his friends. All of these relationships take this movie far beyond the general superhero expectations and into an NC-17ish world that is ironically like real life. I'm still not sure how this movie didn't achieve an NC-17 rating.

The movie does play out well and sticks pretty faithful to the graphic novel. It's almost a good thing that so much time had passed before a movie was ever made. The special effects and sound were light years ahead of what was going on in the mid-80s. The main themes of humanity's savageness and what it might take to unite us are still kept. And no stone is left untouched when it comes to Rorschach's encounter with a child killer or the original Silk Spectre's encounter with The Comedian. This is no X-Men movie.

My feel for the audience was that, for those who knew nothing of the movie other than the trailers, they were more in shock than amazed. For those who had a clue about Watchmen going in, they were impressed. I sure was. There were definitely touches of melodrama, particularly the Scooby Doo-ish reveal at the end, but even the culprit addressed that issue by saying "I'm not a comic book villain. Do you think I'd tell you my master plan if you could possibly do anything to stop it now?"

Watchmen opens nationwide March 6.