Yesterday I went to see the movie Watchmen based on Alan Moore’s comic book series with the same name.

Watchmen takes place in an alternate timeline of the United States in the year 1985. The main difference to our timeline is that this reality has masked hero vigilantes and one super powered hero, Dr. Manhattan. The existence of Dr. Manhattan has changed the course of history in a way such that the US won the Vietnam war and Nixon has changed the constitution so that he had been in office for five terms. This has lead to the US being a very different from our timeline’s counterpart and the existence of Dr. Manhattan has also escalated the Cold War to a state where the world is on the verge of an all out nuclear war.

The movie starts off where masked heroes have become illegal and as such few are still active. But when one of the members of the now disbanded Watchmen team is killed it alerts the former members of the team that there may be someone out to kill masked heroes. This leads to some off the old Watchmen members becoming active again in order to stop this killer before they become his next targets. But things are rarely as simple as they seem at first.

In Watchmen the transition from comic to movie has been amazingly done. The screenplay is almost totally based on the comic with very few scenes missing. This has lead to the movie being rather long, clocking in at 165 minutes with the Future DVD version going past 180 minutes to include those missing scenes.

I really liked the movie but want to note that it is not your regular comic book movie. So don’t expect a X-men like action movie. The movie is mainly about a rich plot and amazing dialogue but has some short but effective and brutal action scenes. I really recommend seeing it.

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• The Spirit
• V for Vendetta
• Push
• Surrogates
• Painkiller Jane