Who will watch The Watchmen?

I finished reading Watchmen this weekend and loved it. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie when it comes out in March, 2009. I've watched the movie trailer about a half-dozen times since finishing the comic. I'm thinking it will do okay. After releasing Iron Man and Hulk this summer, Marvel isn't releasing anything next year, so there'll be less superhero competition. I found it interesting that the Watchmen trailer used Smashing Pumpkin's "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning"; a song originally found on the Batman and Robin soundtrack. Methinks they'll gnab a little bit of the Dark Knight love.

If you plan on reading or seeing Watchmen and want to be surprised, you might want to skip this blog- there'll be spoilers.

As I was reading it, I had been making predictions about how Watchmen would end, and I was way off. And that upset me because it was pretty obvious who the "bad guy" was. Here's a tip: if someone is decreed "The Smartest Man in the World", then he's the bad guy. Even if they don't appear to be evil at first, if they are a genius, they're an evil genius. Just to list a few: The Riddler from Batman Forever, Brain Child from The Tick, Vizzini from Princess Bride, Brain from Pinky and the Brain... pretty much if you have "Brain" in your name or have some/all of your brain exposed that's a good clue too (Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mother Brain from Metroid, etc.).

So, yeah, duh, I missed that clue. But even if I had guessed that Ozymandias was the baddie, I wouldn't have predicted the "alien" destruction twist. Overall the creators did a great job of creating characters that you loved, hated, or were indifferent to, and by doing this hid the bad guy pretty well and the surprise ending very well. I have many more thoughts about Watchmen- maybe I'll blog more, maybe I won't. Hopefully there are readers of this little blog out there who've read Watchmen as well and we can discuss further (please comment/discuss!)