Watchmen

Let me start this post with an apology. I have not yet read The Watchmen. I am next on the list to get it. Wanna hear the worst part? I ordered it, for the library. In fact I ordered all of the graphic novels for quite a while. I love comics, graphic novels, manga, but I hadn't read what many call the best graphic novel of all time. Shame on me.

That being said, I was excited to see the movie. We bought our tickets a few days early for a 10:30 showing at the IMAX. Yay. We don't' see movies regularly on the IMAX, but thought that this one would be worth it. The theater was full. The ushers kept asking us to move in to make room. This was a little scary when Jason went to get popcorn. The usher then let us know that there weren't any previews.

I think I've said it before, I'm one of those people who like previews. I don't fast forward though them at home, and I like to see them at the movies. The usher said the reason was the running time of the adventure we were about to jump into, but I wondered.

You could describe the plot in two ways: One, they didn't waste any time getting into the action, or they spent 90% of the time on backstory and only 10% was plot. I see it this way. The backstories of the characters ARE the plot. The Watchmen is an epic, not an episode. If we didn't hear all of those back stories, it would have been 10 minutes of detective work, and 30 seconds about nuclear war.

I had no trouble understanding the movie, but I've heard that people who hadn't read the book had difficulties. Maybe I've got a mind that just works that way. There is one thing I feel compelled to address:

The nudity. An unexpected form of it, for the uninformed. Full frontal MALE nudity. Yeah. There's a lot of it. The middle schooler in me came out, and I wanted to giggle a bit at first. After I got over that, however, I thought it was good. Not good, like bow chicka wow wow, but good as in it fit.

It contributed quite a bit, in my opinion to Dr Manhattan's complete otherness. If he'd worn, let's say, swimming trunks the whole time, he would have looked silly. If he'd worn anything else on Mars (oops, spoiler), he would have looked too human. So, while I totally couldn't stop looking, I think it did actually add to the character, which is more than can be said for a lot of female nudity.

My favorite character, (my decision slightly influenced by the friend I saw the movie with) was Rorschach. He was so cool! At first, you think he's just psycho, but you realize that he's the truest hero of all of them. He never gave up, never quit. The part that surprised me the most was what he looked like under that mask. Which, speaking of, how did that work? How did it move? So much of the rest of this world is pretty strictly reality based, but that... It was awesome anyway.

The sound in the imax was great. This was the first movie I'd seen in imax that didn't make me look around all of the time. I thought it was really suited. I enjoyed the action scenes, and I thought that overall, the movie could be described as geek bliss. It didn't pull punches. It made the hard decisions, and I loved it for that. I'm terrified of writing spoilers so I'll end there. I give it 9 out of ten blue hot dogs.