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.

Over the weekend I thought that catching up on a few movies might be a nice thing to do, so went and rented out:

• I Am Legend
• Cloverfield
• 27 Dresses

I Am Legend reminded me a lot of Cast Away with Tom Hanks, a lone actor taking ownership of the screen for nearly the entire film. It was probably worth a watch, though I don’t think I’ll ever rent it out on DVD again – so I suppose that is an indication of my overall impression.

Cloverfield, I don’t really know where to start. It had crazy amounts of hype pre-release, I’m pretty sure I recall seeing teaser advertising for it nearly an entire year before it hit the big screen. I haven’t bothered to read up about it online, however my review of it was that it was complete and utter shit. I appreciate that it was meant to be ‘from the eyes of the people on ground zero’ with the camera work – but the Blair Witch Project wore that out about three and a half minutes in. Given it was about an alien creature taking over a big city and tearing it to pieces, the special effects weren’t anything to write home about and there was very limited interaction with them. If it wasn’t for the fact that I got it on a rental guarantee from Video Ezy – it’d be the sort of movie that you wish you could unhire and get your money back.

27 Dresses was more enjoyable than the previous two combined and I didn’t think it was outstanding. There were a few points through the movie where I chucked, however if it was just a little funnier in general throughout, it was have been a really enjoyable movie – not just okay/good.

The upside of the weekend from a movie stand point, I picked up a boxed set of the Alien Quadrilogy on sale – huzzah!

I’ve just finished watching An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about global warming by Al Gore.

Toward the start of the documentary, Al Gore presents a little bit of history about himself. One particular anecdote is about two teachers he had when he was at school; one he disliked and the other who he thought was a bit of a hero. The hero teacher presented his class with some pretty staggering information some thirty to forty years ago that sets the tone for the rest of the documentary.

The staggering information that Al Gore learned about all that time ago had to do with the levels of carbon dioxide in the Earths atmosphere. The teacher presented his findings, which were collected over a six to eight year period and when graphed told a very strong story. Since the 1970’s, the human civilisation has had a profound impact on the Earth and if we don’t change what we’re doing now; there isn’t going to be much of an Earth left for our children or theirs.

One thing that I thought was quite interesting that he pointed out was that the petroleum companies are trying to swing the opinion of the public such that global warming is an idea or myth and not fact. Al Gore says that doubt is their weapon and that if they could put enough doubt into everyones mind that they would not worry about it and just keep doing what they are doing at the moment. Funny he should mention that in his speech because last night I read about a think tank (funded by Exxon/Mobil) that are paying $10,000 to essentially debunk global warming.

I really enjoyed the documentary and it opened my eyes to just how far down the rabbit hole the world is at the moment. If you’re interested and you should be, you can rent it from your local video shop.