As an outsider to this world I found it amazing and a bit boring, both. Read on...

Rating: 6/10 (28 September 2011)

Watchmen (2009)
This is one of those could-have-been movies. It has stunning graphic effects, great gloomy urban mood, lots of wild and curious characters, a superhero plot laden with doubts and human angst, and some ongoing complexity that makes you pay attention.
But there is also an ironic sameness to it all, a similar plodding through, with all the excitement and drama built in all along. There are two large goals to the events.
One is establishing the details of a group of superheroes famous from mid-Twentieth Century America. They meet and they talk, but they talk a lot, surprisingly, when you'd rather see something happen. There are flashbacks, lots of them, and good ones, but the point of them is to fill in the characters, and to suggest some lingering personal problems between them in the past (including relationships that have gone wrong). The point of all this is not only to dovetail plot details, but to make the characters very human, whatever their inhuman powers.
The second is a current problem in a fictional America, set in the 1970s with Nixon enjoying a third term (and Nixon, Kissinger, and some of the other players of those times make appearances). Nuclear war seem imminent. These retired or dysfunctional superheroes are woken up from their withdrawal from society (earlier forced out of service by a government decree) when one of their group dies (the one who dies, the Comedian, seems actually to be a very bad man overall, not a shining good guy). Something is going wrong, and it seems that these superheroes might be required to act, even illegally, to save themselves.
If only their interpersonal squabbles weren't so heavy and damaging. If only they knew who killed the Comedian. If only there was some momentum in this gathering together the past and focussing on the immediate crisis. If only the director had not assumed every viewer was already familiar with the characters, and enamored with them the way you get sucked into comic book heroes.
So even though you can't stop watching because it's so visually interesting, the movie gets ponderous at times, many times, and a little overly simple in its psychology and its Cold War plot. I had never heard of the Watchmen or the legendary graphic novel (extended narrative comic book) that precedes the movie. Diving in fresh, I make associations with superheroes I do know (a lot of them, from older comic books and the many movies in the last decade or two). I tried to learn the powers and flaws of this group (they are ambiguous, beyond their fistfighting prowess, men and women both). And there is the exceptional Dr. Manhattan who seems to have God-like powers, waving a hand and disassembling a tank in mid-air then crushing it into a ball of shards without moving from his stiff, upright position, glowing a nice blue radiation of some kind.
And stiffness? That's a problem all along. As human as everyone is, they have a kind of cardboard or styrofoam acting style. Oh, I know they are cartoons, but still, emotion becomes suggested or told or acted, not expressed. I'm not sure if this is on purpose, keeping the effect like the emotions in a flat, fake character. (If you don't know comic books at all, picture the "emotion" of a person in a Lichtenstein painting--it's a symbolic expression of something, not a real expression.)
For me this is all fascinating but not as involving as I would have liked. I mean, if you compare to the obvious, like a Batman or Spiderman movie, you see a different visual effect in much of it, and it's distinctive and very smart and actually refreshing. But it lacks the propelling plot and the compelling characters, period. For me, as a novice to this world, which I assume many or most viewers can relate to. Still, it's really different, and worth at least a partial look to give it a shot.