Who watches the Watchmen? I did, you shouldn't.

Sunday afternoon Matt, Sarah, and I went to catch a matinee showing of "The Watchmen." Roughly 5 eternities later the credits were finally rolling, and I was as eager to get out of there as I imagine someone being set free from the Hanoi Hilton was, though we could debate who had to suffer the worse torture.

I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum while trying to articulate, as best I can, why this movie joined "Very Bad Things" on the list of movies I would have walked out on had I been alone, and is seriously, though I know this is an overused genre of phrases, one of my least favorite movies.

First, as a bit of background, I enjoy Superhero movies, I'm not a comic book reader, but it's not the genre of movies that bothers me. I have not read the graphic novel, and, previous to this movie, had only heard vague references to "The Watchmen."

Back to the movie: First off, the story is told through a series of flashbacks, I didn't keep official stats or anything, but I feel like a good 40% of them did nothing what-so-ever to advance the plot. In general there were a multitude of scenes that had so little to do with anything that splicing in a scene from Batman Begins would have made just as much sense, as long as you could have had Christian Bale wrap up the scene with "Ok, now lets go do ___"

[Mild spoiler alert] The over arching theme of the movie, that humans are too violent/barbaric/selfish/stupid for their own good, and thus need protecting from themselves, has been done to death. It's touted throughout the movie as some monstrously clever observation of the human condition, when in reality it's fairly obvious. It is possible that this was a fresh new idea when the comics were written, but that doesn't change the fact that this is 2009, and the point has been made in Hollywood 3,000 times in the meantime.

[Spoiler alert] There's also a repeated line in the movie of something (everything/life/existence/the universe/Who knows) being a "joke." I guess the joke was lost on me. Unless they were all referring to that completely unnecessary and uncomfortable sex scene, cause someone must have been joking there.

[Big Spoiler Alert] There was also a big reveal and a twist at the end that were so not shocking that I felt confused. When it's revealed to Laurie who her father was I was just like "Wait, we didn't know that? I swear we knew that already. Maybe it's just that SHE didn't know? Then again, this has all the makings of a typical 'dun dun DUNNN!!' movie twist scene."

[Big Ending Spoiler Alert Continued]When the "this guy is being too good" character betrays everyone I was massively underwhelmed. First off, there was heavy foreshadowing. Well, as much as there can be in the 3 minutes of screen time they spent developing the character. You got the feeling that this was supposed to be a "Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze" type reveal. In reality it was more of a "Kevin Spacey is the killer in Se7en" type reveal, in that you were like "yeah, ok, well, we barely knew him as anything else." To their credit, they did try throwing you off the scent once, and perhaps the story it self isn't as original as they thought. You know the guy is up to no good 2 seconds into his first screen apperance.

In the end I guess as a mid '80s comic book this might have been an original plot, as a 2009 movie I felt like I had already seen it 50 times. Also, I don't need to see that blue dong 200 times.

I did enjoy that all the public figures were real people though.