Movie Review

Who
Watches
Watchmen?

Compiled by Tawsif Saleheen

WHO watches Watchmen? Well I did, a few days back. And I am still reverberating from the utter awesomeness of the movie. The movie is not without its share of flaws to be honest. For starters, it runs for almost three hours. The characters portray contradictory morals. And DR. Manhattan (attention: the weird blue guy in the picture) is plain annoying. Yet, director Zack Snyder manages to turn the apparent flaws of the movie into a film noir masterpiece. He makes perfect use of the three hours to tell a story which is equally intricate and exciting. He uses the moral contradiction of the characters to masked heroes that might as well have existed in the real world. Unfortunately, Dr. Manhattan still remains annoying.

The storyline of Watchmen can get a little confusing at times, thereby leading to a lot of people not liking the movie. In an alternate 1985, Nixon is still president and once-popular costumed vigilantes have been banned from the streets. The Cold War has escalated to the brink of nuclear decimation, and everyone is looking to Dr Manhattan for help. Due to a lab accident, he's a blue-glowing, all-seeing scientist. But someone is killing his former fellow heroes one by one. The shady Rorschach is on the case, as are Laurie, aka Silk Spectre, and Dan, aka Nite Owl, who put their costumes back on and hit the streets.

The film continues the recent tradition of casting proper actors (rather than movie icons), giving the characters a complexity that lets us identify with them as they face up to big issues like truth, morality and mortality. In addition to the central figures, we also meet the nasty Comedian, the first Silk Spectre and the cocky Ozymandias. And in flashbacks we get to see them in their crime-fighting youth, which isn't any less complicated than the present.

While Watchmen is certainly plot heavy enough to go into several more paragraphs of description, its best to leave the discovery to the viewers. But as much time the story devotes to each of the characters during the 150-minute-plus running time there are still fundamental questions in the cracks that are left unanswered and leaves the story, at times, a thematic muddle even when its telling you what its about.

Source: Internet