MEN WATCH WATCHMEN

     No movie in recent memory has elicited a nexus of indecipherable emotions in Carmen’s brain parts as Zak Synder’s Watchmen did. Watching the film on a nearly IMAX-sized screen in an I-could-eat-off-this-carpet Dublin theater whose individual screening rooms listed specs on leg room, audience capacity, and speaker dimensions, Carmen was subject to a near perfect viewing environ for the movie, especially when considering the self-exhorting bro that performed pre-film push-ups and crunches in order to prepare, the obligatory Asian crouched in the corner peaking looks at the theater’s doorway over his Nintendo DS screen. Visually, Watchmen is awe-inspiring. The frenetic pacing and distinct color palettes and set design and costumes and Zak Synder’s mega-stylized camerawork all fuse together and morph into a nine-headed monster that literally pummels the eyeballs with satisfaction. That said, the film is decidedly, undeniably flawed—as is all truly great art—but these shortcomings were so juxtaposed with filmic brilliance-and coupled with the blinding steaming weirdness of the thing, the lines of demarcation became more than blurry between what Carmen considers good/bad in a traditional sense and what is weirdly good/bad in his own deviant perception.
     The first fault lies with the musical choices. Watchmen’s score, the eerily ominous mellotron rolls from the opening of the second trailer, is incredible, perfectly capturing the film’s cerebral, chimerical vision, and playing background to its best sequence: the death and rebirth of Dr. Manhattan; but, unfortunately, somebody in there chose to also include popular music in the film as well. These songs rarely work in conjunction with what’s transpiring on screen and work even less when comparing them to the score. Secondly, Malin Ackerman can’t act. Thirdly, the movie, a much more direct narrative, only serves to point out the really quite flawed denouement that the graphic novel presents. There is no logic to it, never was, and this becomes really apparent when recalling that the events that unfurl are a result of the world’s smartest man and a super-human demigod whose intelligence transcends all human limitations. And this is the just the tip of the iceberg.
     There is a sex scene in this movie that defies description. It produced a feeling in Carmen so complex that to even try to discern between jubilant joy and high-strain horror isn’t even worth it.
     If anything, Carmen can’t recommend any movie more than Watchmen because no other movie can divide a person, and an audience, like it can. There is so much to love and so much to hate that everyone will leave the theater with a different subjective experience. So 4 out of 5 strawberries.