Watchmen

The Filthy Critic is taking the week off because he deserves it. His nephew, Jimmy Critic, is filling in. Jimmy is a student at the local community college who has filled in before and is possibly overqualified to review Watchmen.

Greetings from the grim netherworlds of western Arvada. I am Jimmy Critic, Master of the night, Dark Ruler of the Nocturnum. If I could magically appear from the dark ether in front of you I would. But I have no idea what time of day you're reading this, and I also don't know how to magically appear. Yet. I am a student of the dark arts, though, so don't sleep too well tonight. I know it has been a long time since I last spoke with you all. No fault of my own. It's just that a certain someone around here who shall go nameless really gets his panties all bunched up if he has to share the limelight. That same certain moron wouldn't have to, either, if it weren't recycling week and he hadn't turned in enough aluminum cans to go on an epic bender.

His loss is your gain, of course, since I am far better suited to review Watchmen than he could ever be. First of all, he's a jerk who thinks the best comics are the ones used as filler in the classified ads, like Nancy and Tumbleweeds. Second, I'm a genius. I first made my debut here in 1999, with a review of The Matrix when I was a 14-year-old treasurer of the Raymond Carver Middle School science fiction club. One accounting scandal and six schools later, I'm still here. Now a fifth-year student at Red Rocks Community College, in a self-designed program that will culminate in a doctoral degree in lycanthropy. The professors at RRCC claim you can't earn a Ph.D. in junior college, but they haven't seen my dissertation yet. Not the essay, written in blood. Not the accompanying music I wrote all by myself. And not the life-size diorama worth over $100 that currently resides in my mother's garage.

One of the things I noticed in my old reviews is how childish I sounded. Don't misunderstand me, I was correct. The Matrix is among the greatest achievements of mankind. Now that I'm older and way, way, way more mature, though, I know it isn't the all-time greatest. There are far bigger accomplishments. Like Akira, Mountain Dew Code Red and inventing Call of Cthulhu. Also, RRCC has something called the Society of Creative Anachronism that is probably more rad than you will ever be. So, don't even try. And don't throw milk bottles at us when you see our local Baronie fighting in the park or pay the consequences (see previous reference to my scientific work on being able to magically appear in your bedroom in the dead of night).

I am much wiser and more worldly now that I'm twenty-three-and-a-half. I can express myself more eloquently, and using bigger words. I have drunk beer. I have voted. I have filled out that card at the post office and then hoped there would be a draft so they would give me a gun. I have done other stuff. And I have become far more tolerant of others' opinions. Way back then, I thought anyone who didn't agree with me was a total idiot. I realize now that we can disagree about something without you automatically being stupid. You're wrong, but you're allowed to be wrong about some things and it just means you're not as smart as me.

So, what I've learned in the last ten years is that a mature man must be generous in allowing others their opinions, and he has to choose carefully the reasons to call someone else an idiot. Not totally loving Watchmen is one of them. Seriously, it's so awesome. It is so supercool you are mentally retarded not to love it and know how important it is.

I heard two girls say as I left the theater say, "Oh my God, that was so boring. It was like three hours. The only good thing was that blue guy's schlong." First, no it wasn't boring. There's a difference between important and boring. Important changes your life. Second, yes, it is not quite three hours long and I agree that, like any movie based on super rad graphic novels, Watchmen should be ten hours. If they can make a nine-hour movie where people do nothing but complain about the Holocaust and some hippie-liberal professor can make me watch it if I want to pass his class, then they can make ten-hour awesome movies about superheroes. Shoah is boring. Watchmen is not. Third, if all those girls cared about is Dr. Manhattan's wiener, they missed the entire point of his character. That is that in the future we will all be made super-ripped and colorful as Easter eggs by the miracles of science. Plus, we'll be able to travel to other planets to look at humongous crystal windchimes, and barf whenever we want. That would come in handy in setting the medieval ambiance at our deep-fried turkey leg booth at the RennFaire.

Based on Alan Moore's seminal (thank you, RRCC for teaching me that word) graphic novel, The Watchmen tells the totally timely tale of the Cold War during the 80s, and the world's fear of nuclear annihilation. Nixon is still president, in his fifth term, Russia and the U.S. are at the brink of pushing the button, and superheroes aren't cool anymore. In the fifties and sixties, people dug them. Dudes and ladies in capes with these sweet-looking eyemasks that stick to your face without elastic bands were cool. By the eighties, nobody thought superheroes were cool anymore. I have no idea why not. It turns out the heroes were human, conflicted and tended not to always work for the public's best interest. Deep down, they were just like the rest of us. But since YouTube hadn't been invented yet, they had to get their attention by dressing up in tights and fighting crime instead of whacking themselves in the nuts with sticks.

At the height of the cold war, someone kills former superhero The Comedian. He's not the funny haha kind of comic, like the awesome Gallagher. He's the kind who kills innocents, rapes women and smells foul. Like Dane Cook. This gets the rest of the semi-retired superheroes worried. They haven't hung out together in a long time. But now, they fear for their lives, so they reunite. First is Rorschach. He wears a mask that is constantly changing into different abstract images. During the movie, I saw in his mask two knights fighting over a chest of gold, a sexy vampire drinking the blood of a virgin, two werewolves fighting over the soul of an innocent, and Neo and Morpheus discussing how rad I am. You will too. There are also Nite Owl II, who is sort of like Batman in that he is real rich and can make super cool stuff to help him fight crime. And there is Ozymandias, a fey Swede who will kill you if you ask him if he was in Ace of Base. There is the supersexy Silk Spectre II, who is secretly the daughter of Silk Spectre (no surprise) and THE COMEDIAN! Holy Druids! I remember that powerful plot twist from the novel, but it still shocked me to the very core of my malevolent being.

Most important, though, is Dr. Manhattan. He's a guy who got trapped in a radioactive lab and it turned him into a blue, naked Adonis who can bend matter to his will. He walks around totally naked with his wiener hanging between his ripply, bulgy thighs. He is bald and his eyes glow like my nightlight. He shows no emotion and he can teleport through space. So, like if someone tells him that only losers ride the bus, he can turn their innards inside out and then go to Venus to cry so nobody see him. That's what I would do. Dr. Manhattan is what's keeping the Russians and Americans from blowing each other up. See, the Soviets are afraid that if they attack, Manhattan will walk over there and smash them up.

As those girls said, Dr. Manattan's schlong is impressive. I don't think I have ever seen a blue penis for so long in my life. The director is Zack Snyder, the guy who made the super-duper-important and life-changing 300. Losers said that movie made people gay because of all the guys running around in their underwear. It didn't. And neither will watching Dr. Manhattan's wiener. I think Snyder just has a kneck to show the male body in a way that makes men who are totally into girls, like me, admire them and sort of wonder what it would be like to rub their hands over another man's body, and to feel blue wieners grows and hardens in their hands.

Most of the all-too-brief three hours of Watchmen is not spent on plot. It's on establishing the backstory of each character. As it should be. We need to know every last detail of where they live, how they stopped being superheroes. No matter how ultimately similar each character's story is, we need to hear it in complete detail because this is what matters in the world, to everyone. Except idiots. In fact, the movie needs more. If ever a movie required more scenes where people just sit around lamenting a time that is past, it's this one. Stopping at just 90 minutes of them talking about how secretly unhappy they are is not enough! How about six hours? Or ten hours? I could listen forever.

The dialog in Watchmen is so great it brings tears to the eyes of any normal person. Rorschach is the best. He makes the longest speeches, always to himself in voiceover. And I know they are really super great speeches because they sound exactly like the writing in my Twilight fan fiction. The characters in my stories always have really deep and profound things to say and they do it like they were tough guy detectives. Because that is so supercool and never, ever gets old or belabored!

The Cold War theme totally hits home. It is so timely and everyone can completely remember how scared everyone was in the 80s, every second of every day. I totally remember it, even though I wasn't born yet. Neither were all the other rad guys in the theater when I saw Watchmen. And the idea of conflicted superheroes is totally as fresh as when the comic book was published all those years ago. I mean, it's not like any other movie since then has explored the idea of guys in tights who are flawed and unsure of themselves. Certainly not Batman, Superman, The Incredibles, Spiderman, X-Men, Daredevil, The Punisher, Hancock and all the rest. Nope, Watchmen is the first movie ever to do it. In the extreme, superserious detail it needs.

The movie's best scene is totally the one where Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II do it inside a superhero spaceship. It is the orgasmic explosion that the comic book community has awaited for years. It was so totally hot and everyone always fantastizes about doing it with a superchick in leather in a spaceship. I actually did this once, but seeing it here on the big screen made my craft made from a refrigerator box pale in comparison. Actually having a naked girl in the scene was an improvement, too. You totally will not laugh at people in tights humping because this is a look into the future.

As I said before, Watchmen is not about plot. If you go in expecting to be told an interesting story, you are a fool. It is much more than that. It is like setting up a camera in the closet of these people and spying on their lives. You see the truth about superheroes, which has long been underexposed. It is not a movie, it is an experience. It is not entertainment, it is an expremely deep and three-hour-long superserious exploration of exactly how important superheroes are. A phantasmagoric feast for the intelligent and great. And if you disagree, you are as stupid as my uncle. 4.998 Billion Cylonsout of Five Billion for Watchmen. It loses two million cylons for being only three, instead of ten, hours long.

Also, please be my friend on Facebook. My name there is "Jimmy Critic". Together, we will build an army to take over the world. Jimmy C out!