Worth the wait

Rating: 8/10 (12 March 2010)

After 23 years via Aronofsky, Greengrass and Gilliam in defiance of those who said the material was 'unfilmable' Watchmen is here on screen, and how! America, having won the Vietnam war thanks to Dr Manhattan, is in a dystopic 1985 circa 1967 where Superheroes have been forced into retirement - this is The Incredibles in Sin City. The masked detective, Rorschach, is our guide through the story which focuses on the apparent serial killings of ex-heroes. There's a conspiracy but who's behind it, or is Rorschach just paranoid? Throw in some philosophising on the nature of humanity, the American dream taken to the nth degree and a bizarre love triangle between a god, a Lolita character and a geek and you have a truly remarkable film. The large runtime seems lengthy for a comic book film, until you take into the context the size and scale of the source material - the distilling of which into the cinematic medium has been done, in my not-so-humble opinion, brilliantly by Snyder (who previously gave us camp classic 300). The balance of the dark, foreboding noir cityscape part Gotham City part Se7en, with the hyper-realistic violence perpetrated by protagonists sporting the campest of costumes is incredible. Never slipping into slapstick yet never taking itself too seriously they've gone to town with some of the CGI (particularly some of the scenes on Mars) but for the right reasons and to a certain amount of success as far as i'm concerned. There's no sugar-coating here, the story sinks its canines into reality and tears it to shreds in brutal, visceral, style. It's as true to the graphic novel as possible and all the better for it. A film i'll definitely be watching again and again.