Movie Review Friday: Watchmen

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme that’s currently in theaters or available on DVD. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday.

Watchmen (2009)
In theaters now

Watchmen has been a favorite graphic novel of many, and the movie remains remarkably faithful to the printed version, preserving the era in which the story was written and set, the mid-1980s.

It's well worth seeing if you like a good action film, but some of the film's characters reveal a distressing attitude toward cities, as did the subject of my last movie review, Varmints -- albeit from a slightly different perspective.

Most representative of this negative view of urban life is Rorschach, a violent, somewhat psychotic vigilante who would have been great pals with De Niro's Taxi Driver. His view of New York (and of cities in general) is Gotham-like: a grimy, crime-filled place of corruption.

In Watchmen, it's clear that vigilantism does not make the city a better place. The film doesn't answer the question of what does, but perhaps the answers are already out there... New York has certainly changed since the era in which Watchmen depicts it.

--Adrian Cotter