Watchmen **

Watchmen
Warner Brothers
Paramount Pictures
DC Comics
Running time: 2:43

This could very well be the longest film I've seen since Titanic (1997), which ran 3:17. It did not need to be that long. Very dark and sad--the Chicago Tribune said it made The Dark Knight look sunny, and that's pretty accurate. Often violent and gory with interesting moral ambiguity. This film is inferior, in my opinion, to recent comic films I really liked, such as X-Men, X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Batman Begins and Superman Returns. I don't recommend Watchmen.


SPOILERS

The opening scene--the murder of the Comedian--effectively set the tone for the entire film. The title sequence that followed was very well done, with Bob Dylan's song providing background to a fictionalized version of the latter half of the previous century. Sorry for laughing out loud when Laurie parodied the famous Life magazine photo of a soldier kissing a woman in Times Square. How many terms did Nixon serve if he left office in 1989? It may have been a different America--no Jimmy Carter?--without Watergate. Later in the film, I also liked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center looming large in the background of the Manhattan skyline during those corporate meetings in mid-1980's New York.

Interesting that this film is causing such a commotion, and there was plenty I disliked. The moral ambiguity deserves mention, although Watchmen isn't shy about it and doesn't try to disguise it. The Comedian assassinating JFK? And then shooting his pregnant Vietnamese girlfriend in cold blood. Brutal. I could have done without seeing Billy Crudup's full frontal. Ugh. How many times was that? And I certainly could have done without the fat prisoner having his hands sawed off. I didn't watch that part. His partner really needed him out of the way to saw through Rorschach's cell block? I didn't think so. And I didn't quite understand why Rorschach murdered the dwarf prisoner in the restroom for any reason other than because he could. Did the dwarf organize and execute a prison riot with the expressed purpose of torturing and murdering Rorschach? Perhaps. Rorschach was my favorite character.