Saturday 21 March 2009

Weird Watchmen

Seen the movie Watchmen on Wednesday night. A very odd but interesting movie which was generally good but with the usual silly moments that inhabit these kind of 'superhero' movies. There was even a love scene that went on for too long, exposing too much shiny, moonlit, bottom. One of the main 'superhero' characters even went everywhere naked. A tall, blue superpowered being named Doctor Manhatten who had been transformed accidentally from a normal, everyday nuclear scientist in the late fifties. Becoming a higher form of life with devastatingly god like powers this character considered it acceptable to walk around butt naked... except when he goes to funerals. The best character of the piece was the brilliant Rorschach, a street vigilante who wore a cloth mask with a moving ink pattern over the face. Weird and brilliant and by far the most interesting and psychotic of the characters. Sticking to the original graphic novel (or comic) rigidly, the director Zack Snyder brings the pictures and characters to life in fabulous, full blown fashion, illustrating the alternate New York and the world that goes with it in a bleak, dystopian, nuclear fuelled detail rarely seen in any other 'superhero' movie. Watchmen is not really a 'superhero' movie though. The 'superheroes' themselves possess no super powers, falling more in line with the Batman like character of rich weirdos who dress up to enact justice on the streets. Through these characters Watchmen shows the people that would do this as psychotic, naive, corny and troubled, all battling their own troubled characters in their own way and breaking some bones along the way. Completely unlike any movie I've probably ever seen, it was a bit of a puzzler but with the good outweighing the bad. More weird than anything else.

No comments: