Tries very very hard, maybe too hard.

Rating: 6/10 (28 March 2009)

I want to make one thing clear: I REALLY wanted to love Watchmen. It seemed like my kind of movie from the first time I saw the trailer. However, after spending roughly 2 hours and 45 minutes (!!!) of my life watching them, I think I may have been better served watching something else.
I won't go into too many details, as there are way too many crammed into this movie, but here's how it goes: in an alternate version of 1984, superheroes are real, people know and those same people forced them to retire. So now, the world is teetering on the brink of full out nuclear war and one of the former heroes (the biggest a$$hole of the group) is killed. So the other heroes start to think it might have been one of there own. And then the blue guy gets really tall and walks around with his junk hanging out. His girlfriend, sick of doing a blue guy, hooks up with another former hero, the pudgy Nite Owl. And some other stuff happens before we find out that it WAS one of the heroes (the really rich one) that set it up and he also found some way to save the world by blowing up a bunch of cities and blaming it on the blue guy.
My biggest problem with this movie is it's TOO FREAKING LONG. I'm not against long movies but when you could cut almost an hour of the movie and not lose much, something's wrong there. Also, why did they insist on including shots of Dr. Manhattan's junk? Was it really necessary? We get it, he walks around naked and can blow you up by thinking about it.
The best part of the movie for me was Rorschach. Now THAT is how a vigilante should be portrayed. He's like the complete antithesis of Batman: poor, living under his secret identity and willing to kill without a second thought. I wish they could somehow spin him off for his own movie, even though he met a rough end in this one.
Overall, Watchmen strives to be another genre breaking superhero movie like The Dark Knight but it just collapses under it's own weight. Perhaps if Synder had deviated a little bit more from the source material and cut another half hour of unnecessary scenes, this could have been something epic. Instead, it is an overlong bore fest filled with blue junk, a$$hole heroes and sex scenes ending in a flamethrower going off. See it if you are a Watchmen fan but use caution if you aren't.