Thursday

I hadn't been particularly keen to see Watchmen, until I was offered the chance to watch it at the IMAX - London's largest cinema screen. It is an impressive size, but once you begin watching the film, you quickly forget. It is not a huge step beyond most cinema screens, and as such seems a bit over-hyped. Perhaps a 3-D film would be more interesting. As for Watchmen itself, I have to say the plot was fairly lame. I'm not sure how much we were supposed to take seriously, the characters took themselves very seriously, but it was comical, and there was a rather adolescent philosophy. The character of Dr Manhattan was rather absurd, and seemed like he belonged in the Blue Man group. The film's plot was more complicated than it needed to be, and it built to a slight, morally ambiguous, anti-climax. Nonetheless, I am seduced by the style of these movies - the great soundtrack, the slow-motion, the perfectly framed photography - although there is something motionless about them, as if by capturing the exact picture as it appears in the graphic novel they somehow remove it from the movement that is inherent to movies. This is a very strange film, I found, quite had to get your head around, and definitely only for fans of the genre.