Reel To Reel: Watchmen

Superfriends it ain't.

Going Rate: Worth full-price admission if you're a comic-book geek, otherwise wait for the dollar show.
Starring: Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Jackie Earle Haley
Rated: R
Red Flags: Graphic, Bloody, Often Sadistic Violence. One Strong Sex Scene. One scene of Sexual Assault. Language. LEAVE THE KIDS AT HOME. THIS PICTURE IS RATED R FOR GOOD REASON!

(Dearest Readers, beginning with this edition of Reel To Reel, I'm doing away with the star rating. My screening habits weed out most movies below two stars, and it's rare for me to see anything that gets the full four. Another reality is this: some of my favorite films are cheesy, low-budget laughers like Any Which Way You Can and How To Beat The High Cost Of Living, which don't rate very high on the technical merit scale. Either a film works for you or it doesn't, but I'll try to split the difference with at least a recommendation on how much you should pay to get in the door.)

I wonder if part of The Incredibles was inspired by the universe of Watchmen, the comic book -- ahem, graphic novel -- where superheroes exist but are forced into retirement after they get out of control and generate a congressional ban called the Keene Act. It's the most intriguing part of a film that works when it deals with these people trying to live normal lives haunted by their alter egos. When this film strays from that thread, things cloud up or shed blood -- lots of it -- or turn pornographic. I must tell you all that nowadays I avert my gaze from any explicit sex scene that comes up in a movie, editing the film with my eyes. Out of sight, out of mind.

The film rewrites history to open in an alternate 1985 and the fifth term of Richard Nixon. Nope, term limits don't exist in this country, and neither does the stain of Watergate or the mess of Vietnam. Rest assured the Cold War survives, and we're still in danger of a nuclear holocaust. We don't have SDI to protect us, but we do have Dr. Manhattan (Crudup), a human-formed mass of atomic particles who talks like HAL 9000 and glistens like a member of Blue Man Group who swallowed a neon fixture. He started out human until a nuclear test-lab accident turned him into pure energy. Now he can teleport anywhere and vaporize anything with his bare hands. He also works mostly in the nude, so avert your eyes again.

While the Doctor builds particle reactors, somebody's killing off ex-superhero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). He's the one who wears that blotched smiley-face you see in the posters. We don't know how he got the name other than his sick sense of humor. Word of his death spreads faster than The Flash on performance-enhancers to his old pal Rorschach (Haley), whose only superpower is a really cool shape-shifting mask. Soon other retired supers find out including Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode). Rorschach is the only one still fighting crime on an active basis, in a shadowy Dashiell Hammett mode. He suspects more supers are on the death list and starts running down leads in his gravelly take-no-prisoners style.

Ozymandias heads a global conglomerate and is supposedly smarter than anybody else on the planet. Spectre is playing it straight, although she's romantically involved with the Doctor, as involved as one can be with a blob of detached philosophical matter. You wonder if they kissed on the first date and what it felt like. It's not easy loving somebody who speaks to you with the emotion of a voice mail system, so she ends up in the arms of Owl, who still has a mask and super-gadgets in the basement gathering dust. The two find they both share a desire to be heroes again and team up with Rorschach to find The Comedian's killer.

Watchmen reveals a sinister side of superheroes, people with moral deficiencies who explode into violent acts like Superman with road rage. These heroes are not role models, nor do most of them have any super powers save for the ones they've bought or invented. Unfortunately, the movie loses its most appealing elements for regular audiences and geeks out on its aforementioned excesses and a dose of existentialism. The ending will leave more than a few people saying, "Huh?" Like last summer's The Dark Knight, this is a film people feel like studying and analyzing instead of merely watching, although nothing in the trailers would lead you to believe that.