Okay, so about the movie...

Let's start with how long it is.  It's two and a half hours, and it has a plot that needed three hours to tell.  I'm aware it was edited down from something like that length, which was telling especially in the first forty minutes and the last forty.  Subplots that needed at least one more scene to work didn't have those scenes.  For instance-- and now I'm going to speak obscurely so as to avoid having to put a spoiler alert at the beginning of this-- the accountant's subplot was missing a scene that would have given him some important motivation.  And if you don't know what scene must have been missing, email me.

So I liked it a lot, but I want to see the director's cut of this film before I start calling it the Godfather of superhero movies, as I've heard a couple of times.  I think it very nearly was what the filmmakers wanted it to be, but it didn't quite make it.  There was an overarching message that just didn't get delivered, and that became important at the end, which is the real reason so many people are sitting in silence after the movie is over.  It's not that they're stunned by what they've just seen, it's that they didn't understand the ending of what they just saw.  (BTW, if you're planning to see it in IMAX, my advice would be to see it in the theater first.  IMAX films have to be edited for length, so you might lose another 1/2 hour of plot, and the film is confusing enough already.)

Now: Heath Ledger.  The highest compliment I think I can make about his performance is that I couldn't see him in there.  At all.  His Joker was a brilliant and terrifying force of nature.  Absolutely Oscar-worthy.

After being all giddy about the gorgeous visuals I saw in the Watchmen preview I've come down to earth just a little bit.  Something's bugging me.  See, the guy making this is the same one who made 300, which was all visuals and machismo and anachronism (see below) and about as subtle as a double-D's in a strip club.  To tell Watchmen you really do need to grasp the subtle.  And I don't know if Zach Snyder has it.  

I'll give you two problems I saw in the preview (which I've since watched three more times): Nite Owl has no paunch, and the Silk Spectre is clearly  in her mid-twenties.  These are two aging, retired heroes who have been out of the game for a decade.  Their story arcs include learning how to be heroes again.  A buff Nite Owl and a Silk Spectre who is supposed to be a fit forty year old do not match those story arcs very well at all.

So I'm... a bit worried.

Aside: Regarding 300, I think someone needs to point out that the signature line from the film-- "Spartans!  Tonight we dine in hell!!!!"-- makes zero historical sense.  The Greeks had no concept for "hell" in the sense invoked by this phrase.  They did have Hades, which was an all-encompassing underworld land of the dead, and you went there regardless of the kind of life you led.  You can argue all you want that that's what Leonidas meant when he said "hell", but seriously: "tonight we dine in the afterlife"?  No, he meant "hell" in the sense we think of it, which is where you go when you've been a bad person.  The phrase is, "we are going to be some serious bad-asses now and we don't care where we end up for it."  Hell, in other words.

Anyway, that bugs me every damn time I hear it.