Worth watching for you?

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2009)

NOTE: This is a cut/paste (and slight touch-up) of one of my message board comments. It pretty much addresses my take on a prevalent, hot issue re "Watchmen"; it it worth watching?
Here's my experience: Snyder opens up with the murder of the Comedian. I want to know why; he seems like a strange, rich, complex person. A bit tragic, perhaps? Who is this guy in his penthouse app't, reading Hustler and channel surfing? And why a crack assassin? Oh! Look! A bit heavy-handed, perhaps, and no doubt impaired by encroaching post-middle-age, but he does pack a wallop! And why does the assassin at least afford the Comedian some semblance of a fair fight?; he could have just plugged him in the brain and pocketed the fee. Is it because it's a movie, and people expect action, or is there something else? And then the credits montage rolls; beautiful, colorful, with taunting images that set up the parallel universe in which Silhouette gets the nurse, we get a good look at the dude on the Grassy Knoll (do I know him?(!)), the phalanx of National Guardsmen shoot the DFH's point-blank, and some blue dude is shaking hands with Kennedy.
At this point, I'm on the edge of my seat; and I don't mean that literally: The film has given me all the cues I need to get locked in and poised to take in the story from a particular mindset. I'm going to be scouring the screen, looking for visual clues, contextualizing the flashback vignettes, carefully processing the spoken lines to try to understand what makes the characters tick. I know that sounds like a normal response to normal storytelling, but for me I'm talking about one especially engaging kind of movie storytelling.
And this is what this kind of movie does to me. Memento (Christopher Nolan flick with Guy Pierce) did this to me, for pretty much the same reasons; on-screen characters are doing things out of the ordinary, for reasons that may be opaque at first, but the film work quickly leads me to believe that if I do my part, if I pay attention and dig hard enough, I'll break the code and understand. And, if I'm really lucky, the flick will not have lead me astray. It pays off in silver dollars.
Watchmen does all this for me.