Film review: Watchmen (again…)

4.5 out of 5

Our resident SkyCity employee, Chris Paulin, wasn’t too impressed with the Watchmen. It was too hard to follow, he complained, but the arm rippingly good time had by some of the main characters constituted it to get a measly 3 out of 5. Hold up! Me being the editor and all, I think I get to digress and write my own little Watchmen review in order to do it justice. So here it goes:

Now, I’ve only just started reading the graphic novel, so I don’t really think I have the grounds to compare and contrast the film to the actual source material, but what I can say is this: I hate superhero films with a passion. With the exception of the Pixar animation film, The Incredibles, I hate watching people in Spandex and Latex (or anything that generally ends in ‘ex’) running around trying to save the world. I refuse to see The Dark Knight, no matter how good it’s meant to be. That’s how much I’m adverse to superhero films.

After having watched the trailer though, the concept of The Watchmen intrigued me. These were an entirely different calibre of superheroes, some of whom were jaded about the state of society and others who are just plain psychopathic. So, with no preconceptions of The Watchmen story, I settled down to watch a film that would take up the next 2 hours and 45 minutes of my life.

I’m not even going to try and explain what goes on in Watchmen in detail, other than that the story begins in 1985 with the death of Mr Edward Blake (Jeffery Dean Morgan, otherwise known as Denny ‘the one that died’ from Grey’s Anatomy), a man whose alias, The Comedian, is formerly a masked superhero who supposedly tried to uphold law and order in New York . Having discovered this act of foul play, Rorschach (Jackie Earl Hadley), the movies ‘anti-hero’ superhero, assumes that this is the beginning of an attack on the worlds masked heroes and decides to investigate further by warning his old superhero entourage that danger is impending. This motley crew includes big