Watch Out

Comic fans, you may want to just turn back now, because I'm about to take a massive dump on something many of you hold nigh-sacred.

Yesterday, I went to go see the new movie, Watchmen. I had not been planning to do so. Not too long ago, I basically swore off comic book movies. It wasn't that I had been burned by one recently -- in fact, I think the last one I'd seen was The Dark Knight, which I thought was rather good. But I'd seen a lot of them over the years that I thought were garbage, including a handful that were well-regarded by many people. I think I'd just heard some announcement about how 17 more obscure superheroes that no one would know who doesn't frequent a comic book shop had been optioned to appear in soulless summer blockbusters, and I just decided enough was enough. These movies weren't going to get any of my money.

Well, Watchmen didn't either. Someone else bought the ticket for me. But I confess, even as the generous offer was being made, a voice in my head was telling me to politely decline. If indeed I was doing anything like a boycott on anything like a principle, this was a pretty lame cheat around it. But more to the point, everything I'd seen about this movie (and it was absolutely everywhere -- trailers before every movie, spreads in Entertainment Weekly, and much more) told me I probably wasn't going to like it.

But free movie, right?

Well, as I was painfully reminded, one's time is also a currency. I may not have given any dollars to this film, but I still had to give it 160 minutes. (Holy crap! Who makes a comic book movie that's nearly three hours long?!) And what an expensive price that was.

Watchmen is a boring, meandering mess. It starts off on the wrong foot by thwarting its own attempts to establish a narrative. The plot begins with the murder of a superhero; who did it, and for what purpose was he wanted out of the way? Are other heroes' lives in danger? Possibly interesting stuff, except that for the first 90 minutes of the film's considerable running time, there are barely ever five consecutive minutes addresssing this plot. Instead, momentum is repeatedly interrupted for flashbacks to the histories or "origin stories" of the considerable cast of characters.

You might argue that's the story structure of the TV series Lost, which I love. But that's a story being told over more than 100 hours, not meant to be digested in one sitting. And Lost didn't delve into the backstories of its characters until the "series proper" began; the two-hour pilot episode dealt solely with the plane crash and its immediate aftermath. It also helps that the flashbacks of Lost were interesting mysteries in and of themselves. In Watchmen, each digression from the plot is more boring than the one preceding it.

By the time the movie finally started to move forward, it was already too late for me to care much. Not that it had much momentum even then. There are time-wasting digressions like sight-seeing on the planet Mars, and looking in on the bunkered war room of alternate-reality President Nixon (the worst attempt to use makeup to create a look-alike ever committed to film).

Even if the plot of the movie didn't engage me, you might think I'd have to award points for the stylish visuals. But no, I find the whole thing too self-aware. The movie went out of its way to create one comic book frame after another -- re-creating art from the original book, I'd imagine. The moments called attention to themselves through annoying usage of things like slow motion and fake looking CG (used so that the exact position of things like falling objects could be meticulously controlled).

More than anything, I was bored. Bored for nearly three hours straight. I thought at the time that I wasn't actually hating the movie like I did The Hills Have Eyes or 30 Days of Night, so I wasn't going to give it an F when I reviewed it. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I had to ask myself: what thing about the movie did I think was decent to salvage anything out of the experience?

I couldn't think of a single thing.

So, Watchmen gets the first F of the year. I believe it to be a movie only a fan of the comic could love.