Watchmen

Every once in a while ... the entire universe is out to con you :) !!

Seriously !! When IMDB tells you that a superhero movie made by Zack Snyder (the maker of the ubercool 300) is rated at 8.0 by the users and newspaper reviews give it a thumbs up, you just cant wait for the weekend to come - atleast I couldnt !

And after the long wait, when the movie begins with an awesome hand-to-hand combat in the graphic style of 300, you possibly couldnt have asked for anything more !! But that joy starts getting replaced with confusion and then boredom and finally irritation - at the ridiculousness of it all. Even 300 was ridiculous, agreed. But it had the coolness which made up for it - which Watchmen has precious little of.

Set in an imaginary 1985 when the Cold War is still on, a group of ex-superheroes who were disbanded/retired from public life get stirred when one of them, The Comedian, gets murdered in the opening scene of Watchmen. The masked Rorschach decides to try and uncover the secret of the Comedian's death - with the suspicion that maybe someone was trying to targeting 'the masks' ...
His investigation and the subsequent events reveal that there exists a plan allright, but the identity of the orchestrator and the final motive is much more than what he had imagined.

The story weaves back and forth between the past and present as each of the superheroes are introduced and we are told about them in detail. The most striking characters are the dead Comedian and the blue Dr. Manhattan - who has some amazing superpowers. However, even though the characters are more gray than, lets say, a Spiderman - but they are as exciting as a potato !! While the Hulk or even the Ironman werent great superhero movies, but atleast they got you rooting for them !! This has to the most boring bunch of superheroes ever !

I can go on and on, but I will try to summarize what is wrong with this movie. Watchmen is a movie for the REAL movie connoisseur - the ones who can give a 6 hour lecture on the significance of the .... green pants of the Joker in The Dark Knight. I am not even sure there was a green pant, but you get the drift. People who will go gaga over how dark the movie setting is, which is a reflection of how flawed each superhero character is - how Rorschach is a borderline psychopath and how The Comedian, even though a despicable human being, understood humanity more than anybody else etc. If you are the kind who raves about these things, then the movie is for you.If you are a regular bloke (like me), then you wont get jackshit out of the movie :)