I'm a bit of geek for "Watchmen", and you have to be really familiar with history and the social sciences of the time to truly appreciate the movie. I thought the movie was great, though I was disappointed not more from the comic book made it in, but I suspect that will happen in the DVD. Rorsach's mask to me was a big miss for the movie. It would have been great to explain the murder of Kitty Genovese which wash horribly brutal, I got the very graphic details in my Crim Law class in law school last year even though I read about it time and time again. How about fourty plus people spent nearly an hour watching and listening to the brutal rape and murder of a woman right in front of their apartment building, no one even calling the cops. The murder of Kitty Genovese, is what causes Rorsach to become a masked vigilante, but the murder of the little girl in the movie propels him into full blown vindictive vigilante. In the original comic book he cuffs the guy to the furnace and sprays kerosene everywhere before handing the murderer a hacksaw, so the murderer can hack through his own arm to get free.
I thought the use of relative unknowns really helped the movie, although my fiancee informed me the comedian was played by a character on Grey's Anatomy(I don't watch it with her) who one of the women doctors falls in love with.
But the movie does a good job encapsuling the 80's, I'm only 24 but many of my cousins were teenagers during it and so much of the popular culture of the time centered on nuclear holocaust and oblivion, mixed with disillusionment of citizens with law enforcement (i.e. Serpico), and the authors who wrote the comic book at the time did not know the U.S. government had the CIA getting arms to the Afghannis, and many folks world round were worried about Russia's venture into Afghanistan. But you have to appreciate humanity and the 80's. I was glad that Ozymondias got outed, there was a scene in the introduction where I thought he was at a David Bowie concert initially (I leant over to my fiancee to point it out, and she leant back and said "it's a gay club") and a second later I saw it.
The nudity of Dr. Manhattan was...artistically necessity, it got annoying at one point during the movie but if I had God-like powers and was ripped like him and hung like an elephant I'd probably walk around nude too, lol. My fiancee thought it was funny, and the one sex scene was soft-core porn-like (hey I got my fiancee to try a new 'move' after).
Again it's one of those movies where you have to be able to think, and if you are not very literate or worldly you will not appreciate it for what it is. It's not a murder mystery, or even a diabolical plan by Ozymondias, all that is a mere back drop. What the movie signifies is that part of human thought where we like to think that most heroes are flawless. How many comic book heroes for the longest time were perfect, morally pure, characters. Imagine Superman with megalomania, or Batman with sociopathy, and Wonder Woman with a penchant for homosexual activity, but enough of that. Also it's a play on our own culture. The 60's,70's, and 80's were great periods of culturea and political change, upheavals of values. How much of that could really have happened had you a God-like being walking hand-in-hand with a conservative-far-right government, remember how much of a paranoid SOB Nixon was. I like Nixo overall but the man was scum at day's end and he had the FBI go after Lennon and a few others. And then there are the regular masked heroes who seem bound to old values(though they won't practice them for themselves) who are prepared to beat and murder many whom they feel are upseting the social order. The riot scene was about New Yorkers wanting cops on the streets, not vigilantes, with cops there is at least a minute chance they will have to answer to the people for their actions, but vigilantes are bound to no law except death.
Well I've ranted long enough and I'm sure the rest would be lost on a lot of people. Go see the movie, Jupiter junior has nice tits and you get see plenty of them.