“You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?”
-- Freeman Dyson
-- Freeman Dyson
If you ask a person who pays attention to such things to name you a movie Zack Snyder directed, you'll probably get Man of Steel, 300, Dawn of the Dead, heck, maybe even Sucker Punch, before you get to Watchmen. That's a real shame. In keeping with his trademark visual flair (Dawn of the Dead notwithstanding), Watchmen has the slo-mo fight scenes, garish costumes, and vivid colors you would expect, especially given that it's adapted from a graphic novel. I mean no insult when I say it is cast entirely with B-listers (Gerard Butler's entire portion was cut from the final product), because they all deliver stunning performances.
The movie takes place in an alternate history, where superheroes exist, the year is 1985, and thrice-elected Richard Nixon is trying to steer the free world away from nuclear war. The film comes stocked with the typical superhero characters: the deeply disturbed, gruff-talking Rorschach, the reluctant, unsure Nightowl, the smartest, fastest man alive Ozymandias, the sex symbol Silk Spectre (it's telling of comic book movies that that's still the best we can do for a female character), and most impressively, the god-like Dr. Manhattan. Each intersecting story has the feel of a different movie. Rorschach's feels like a gritty cop drama, Night Owl and Silk Spectre's has a hint of romance, Dr. Manhattan's of sci-fi. The unifying thread being, of course, the action movie underlying it all, and the always-present threat of a nuclear holocaust.
When I alluded to Dr. Manhattan being the most impressive, I didn't just mean his powers, although without being a comic book expert, he's definitely the closest character to omnipotent that I can think of. The impressiveness comes in how interesting his portion of the movie is. The reason it's so difficult to craft a compelling Superman movie, is that weakness is inherent to good storytelling, or more specifically, the overcoming of weakness. Conversely, kryptonite, a weakness he cannot possibly overcome (ignore the terrible Superman Returns) does nothing to address that issue. Dr. Manhattan's part is so well-written, with the question of what happens if one becomes so disconnected from the mortal coil that they have no stake in our world, that it is easily the most compelling subplot of the movie. Most of the Watchmen, with the exception of Silk Spectre and Night Owl, feel like they could carry their own movie, which you would hope for from a movie with a hefty 162 minute runtime, but is nevertheless quite an achievement.
The question Watchmen ultimately asks is: would it be right to kill 1 person to save 1000? What about 2? What about 999? What about 2000 violent criminals to save 1000 doctors? The characters all have their answers, but the movie never definitively picks a "right" one, enhancing the effect. Watchmen works as a sci-fi movie, an action one, a dramatic one, and leaves you thinking about it long after the credits roll. Aside from a bit of a pacing issue in the first half, where it's only partially to blame for staying faithful to the source material, it is an almost flawless work.
A thinking man's superhero movie; it achieves lofty themes most superhero movies can't even dream of