Watchmen: Long Live The Blue Penis!

Well it's finally here: Watchmen. And long live the blue penis! Billy Crudup’s full frontal naked cerulean blue superhero Dr. Manhattan is only part of the distracting weirdness in director Zack Snyder’s wildly ambitious attempt to turn Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel into a pop mindfuck of a film. The film centers around a sinister plot to bump off ex-superheroes, set in an alternate Nixon-era universe where superheroes have helped win the Vietnam war and nuclear war between Russia is on the horizon.

The opening accompanied to Bob Dylan’s The Time’s They Are A Changing is spectacular -- shifting swiftly through the complex back stories to the Minutemen superheroes morphing eventually into Watchmen, with Kennedy’s assassination, and everything else thrown in. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), with his constantly shifting face mask, is the hard-boiled narrator -- paranoid, mean and crazy. Patrick Wilson plays the thoughtful Nite Owl, pining over the slinky avenger Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), who is bedding the big blue guy, Dr. Manhattan (Crudup), transformed by a laboratory accident to his current form. There there are stories within stories and the tone is constantly shifting between serio-comic political satire to dark nightmarish violence. I left the movie thinking, I’m not sure what this is but it’s damn good fun. Overlong, with windy metaphysical speeches, and mind-altering vistas, it’s a crazy trip of a movie -- but one I appreciate and applaud for its daring.