Over the weekend I watched the movie Watchmen and I’m really not sure what to think.

When it was still coming soon to the cinemas and I saw the Watchmen movie trailer, I immediately thought it wasn’t your garden variety superhero movie like Superman, no the superhero’s in the Watchmen movie have a dark side to their personalities that they are more than happy to let out from time to time.

A 50,000 foot overview of the movie sees it set in an alternate reality in the mid 1980’s. In this alternative reality, superheroes exist and are integrated into the community. The superheroes are not active anymore and a number of them have ‘come out’ and let their previously secret identities become public knowledge. One of the superheroes is murdered, which sparks a number of other superheroes to start up their own investigation and in the process, uncover a much larger plot which they are pulled into.

The murder of the superhero happens quite quickly in the Watchmen movie – however then significant time is spent not doing a whole lot. There are sections of the movie that are quite excellent, a number of the fight scenes come to mind and their willingness to dispense unchecked violence on the bad guys is great. However, the movie goes for nearly two and a half hours but in my opinion – not enough is happening. I was sitting there watching the movie, constantly waiting for the next thing to happen and wondering if it ever would.

I love superhero movies, however if I were a reviewer – I don’t think I could give it more than 2-3 stars. While I was really looking forward to seeing it before it made it to the cinema, I’m really happy that I missed it in the cinema or I fear I would have left the theatre very disappointed in my value for money on the cost of the movie ticket.

While I didn’t personally rate the movie that highly, popular review site Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at about 64% positive reviews. Reading through the comments, it appears that if you’re familiar with the graphic novel (read: comic book) – you’d absolutely love the movie as it was apparently quite true to form. Not having read or even cursorily being aware of the Watchmen background, I found it a little hard to really enjoy.

I’ve watched other superhero movies on DVD literally dozens of times, unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be putting the Watchmen DVD on my Christmas shortlist or be renting it from the movie store again.