Watchmen

After years of waiting for The Watchman comic book mini-series classic to be turned into a movie, fans were ecstatic to hear that their dreams were coming true in 2009. Teaser trailers and then longer theatrical trailers pumped the adrenaline into the fans at breakneck speeds, with action sequences that seemed to come to life right from the pages. With all the hype from the studios, and the fight with Fox studios over ownership, the movie fans were getting a little leery about how good this film was really going to be.
After years of being in retirement The Comedian, a former member of the super hero group The Watchmen, is murdered and sets off an investigation the may lead to the destruction of the world. Visually this film is drab and unremarkable which reflects the “real world,” but then where the heroes are involved the color strikes out and almost breathes life into the scenes. The film gets bogged down in the outdated 80's message that its trying to convey, that nuclear weapons are bad and that the super-powers should disarm and play nice with each other. Because the film makers push the message as much as they do they don’t spend to much time on the action aspect of the story. The action sequences are very well done, the sequence at the prison riot is extremely good, but there are so few its hard for the audience to keep focused through this 2hr 43min movie. One thing that you must keep in mind about this film is that there isn’t too much that you need to see on the big theater screen. There aren’t a lot of special effects that you need to see in the theater, any household with a big screen TV, which is most of them now a days, will show you the same thing, and where the film is almost three hours long you’d be more comfortable. All in all the movie is well worth the time to see, the only draw back is that if there is a younger audience watching then there may be questions afterwards about different aspects of the story. But that’s something we should all be looking for in our movies, something to take us away for awhile and to challenge our minds, and this film works both of those facets nicely.