Watchmen

For a film which is based on what is supposedly the greatest comic book of all time, I found myself remarkably unimpressed by Watchmen. Upon leaving the cinema I struggled to work out what the big deal was. Although the film's ending left me with an interesting philosophical question to ponder, I didn't see why it merited almost 3 hours of watching paper thin characters bumbling around not doing much at all in a poorly-drawn alternate version of the 1980s.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way. This is a film which opens with great promise. A character is killed by a mystery assailant in the first scene. While the credits roll there is a re-telling of post war US history in a series of visually-stunning slow-motion sequences. We are introduced to the idea of a world with superheros; but not superheros in the Superman sense, these appear to be ordinary people who have remarkable skills and have chosen to don capes, rubber and masks in order to become society's saviors.

Immediately the set-up is out of the way, the plot goes downhill. The film spends the next hour desperately trying to introduce its characters. There's a dude in a shifting mask who is a nutter, a bloke who gave up his life as superhero but wants to go back to it and a woman who is infatuated with the supernatural Dr Manhattan. That's really all there is to the main characters. Despite the many flashbacks which tell the backstory and reams of dialogue, I never felt like I knew these characters, why they decided to be 'heroes', why they gave up in the first place or why they've decided to don the capes and rubber for a second time.

Right at the start of the film on a wall a piece of graffiti asks 'Who watches the Watchers?' The film has no answer to this question as the Watchmen are a law entirely unto themselves, deciding the fate of humanity between them while presidents of nations are mere pawns. None of the superheros ever interact in a meaningful way with a normal person, everyone they encounter is either a evil criminal to be punished or a cowering weakling waiting to be saved. If Watchmen is supposed to be about the role that superheros could play in a real world, then it fails because it fails to portray anything about the real world.

Admittedly the special effects are impressive, but I kind of want to know what the point of a massive golden clockwork mechanism rotating above the surface of Mars is rather than simply being in awe of it. Perhaps I should read the comics books, because this film adaptation did absolutely nothing for me.