Watchmen

In what has become an alarmingly dull trend, I find myself once again sort of liking but not really loving another movie. What happened to my ability to form positive or negative opinions? Watchmen did a lot of things well, but still had a few flaws. You want the good news or the bad news first? Rhetorically, we'll default to alphabetical order and start with the bad.

The movie was more than three hours long. Even in an age where movies run way too long, that's just egregious. Because of its endless running time, it took me three nights to finish, interrupting any sense of momentum. Although it was visually impressive, it completely lost my interest on multiple occasions. Not coincidentally, the movie was also way too hard to follow for a superhero comic book adaptation. Was it hard to follow because I lost interest too often, or did I lose interest too often because it was hard to follow? Tough to say. But in general, I was never really aware of what the point of the three-hour movie was, except that someone was hunting down and killing members of the Watchmen. The timeframe jumped back and forth from the Vietnam War to the present day - an alternate timeline's 1985, in which Richard Nixon is still president - and as such, characters who had died over an hour ago routinely came back into the mix. There were also too many characters to keep track of, or maybe it was just that the characters themselves weren't well defined or even introduced properly.

So, clearly the movie had several shortcomings. Let's talk about where it succeeded. It was just a real treat to look at, first of all. Zack Snyder has a flair for choreographic violence, and in a three-hour comic book adaptation there is plenty of time for choreographic violence. There were several great character moments, too. While I stand by my lamentation that I couldn't differentiate enough of the characters to discern any real plot, I'll also admit that I was most invested in the movie during its character-moment-heavy first and third half-hours, particularly as they related to Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, respectively.

Watchmen won't go down in my mind as one of the greatest movies I've ever seen, or even that I'll see this year. But it had its moments. Keith seemed to be a big fan of the original graphic novel on which all this was based; perhaps he'll be able to follow this movie more than I could and, as such, enjoy it more. Time will tell.