Movie Review: The Watchmen

So, while in Las Cruces this weekend visiting some friends that go to NMSU, we decided to go see The Watchmen. We didn’t know exactly what it was about, but had something to do with superheroes killing superheroes, so how bad could it be right?

The opening sequence came on and I was like “Damn, this is a heavy opening” and pretty much as the film continued, a version of the same thought ran through my head. The movie was very dark and very heavy. I don’t just mean the colors were dark and it was raining 90% of the time, the mood was dark, the story was dark, the dialogue, everything. Most superhero movies, Batman, Superman, etc, have a relatively simple plot: bad guy gets neutralized by the good guy, happy, feel-good type of film. This one was not so simple. There was a lot of strong, and generally controversial issues.

Clearly its makers wanted The Watchmen to be an epic type of movie. Often though, in their attempts for epic, they just ended up making it long. There were definitely scenes throughout that I thought either could be left out entirely or could easily be shortened to get the same feeling, same gist, across without all the extra bells and whistles.

For 2 hours and 45 minutes of film, the last 15 minutes of happy, sunshine-y, feel-good-ness did not make up for the 2 and a half hours of gloomy, dark, weighty epic-wannabe. We still left the theater kind of feeling withdrawn and down.

I would give this movie three out of five stars. The visuals were good, the sound was intriguing most of the time; the movie was different than most others and certainly other superhero movies.