The Watchmen Review

The Watchmen is part action, part mystery, part drama, but mainly it’s just damn interesting. The movie itself is a near carbon copy of the graphic novel, and it doesn’t just skim the interesting bits from the top – it delves into a lot of detail.

There’s a lot of adult subjects in here. From nudity to excessive gore to political commentary to deep characterization, The Watchmen doesn’t treat you like you’re stupid. It gives you the respect to watch a deep, adult oriented movie, without having to dumb anything down to appear “main stream.”

The characters are all pretty interesting. But no one hits the spot quiet as well as Rorschach does. The actor that plays this character hits him spot on, and you feel how disturbed and troubled he is. He plays the character so perfectly, it’s spooky.

As you may have seen from the trailer, this movie is very stylized. It’s a visual delight to watch this movie. It conveys the dark, gritty nature of the graphic novel to near perfection. The action scenes are also very exciting, having a “300″ feel to them. That being said, the action scenes are definitely not the focus of the movie, unlike 300.

As I mentioned earlier, the movie is a nearly identical to the source material. While this is usually considered a good thing, I found it to detract a little. There was no sense of revealing, no sudden twists, nothing unexpected. The only difference, that came near the end, was a thankful change of pace, which I felt worked very well with the movie. But it’s attitude of making an exact replica of the graphic novel turns out to be both a blessing and a curse, from my opinion.

I also did not enjoy some of the music selections. I wish it was more ambient, more dramactic, more somber. a lot of the songs selected I felt did not really fit as they should have. The trailers had excellent music, as did 300, but I felt The Watchmen itself could have done a lot better in this regard.

Overall, it was a highly entertaining film. It was full of complex ideas, interesting characters, and has a very deep, gritty world. The visual effects work wonderfully, accompanying the movie and its world, but not overshadowing them. I enjoyed the film, and hope that movie-goers who were not Watchmen fans also appreciated it.

7/10