It's not really that simple, either. If you look at a film like Babel, you can see that a movie can have either numerous protagonists or no protagonist at all, depending on how you choose to interpret the word. There's clearly a story there, but it's not of the form "this person did these things" or "these things happened to this person." Nor is it really as simple as "there are several stories happening in this movie" either.

But whatever. That's film-school wankery at its finest.

Did we not already have the time zone conversation?

I think it's one of those movies you're either going to like or dislike before you ever see it. I have an unhealthy fascination with the Age of Sail, and the Hornblower books are some of my favorites, but I have to confess that I broke upon the Aubrey/Maturin books like water on rock. They were just too dense for me. So the movie makes me happy, happy.

I wanted characters. And a plot.

I could get behind the "Hitch Hiker's Guide." I know what my opinion was of that flick — and it surprised me — but I'm curious about y'all's.

In a manner of speaking.

Oh hey. There's a thing going on in here.

Okay, so Dr. Manhattan is not Superman. Superman has been through like a million different iterations over the years — or so I've heard; I'm not a comic-book fan myself — and the pattern seems to be that he gets more and more powerful (by virtue of having lazy writers give him a new ability to get him out of the story of the week or whatever), and then some mini-reboot knocks him back down to a less omnipotent level.

Dr. Manhattan, on the other hand, is God. I think the point of the character is that a truly omnipotent character would — or at least might — be inhuman, but if the authors were trying to say that about Superman, they were beating up a straw … superman. Whatever.

I know there's a pretty good age spread among the Down in Front crowd, meaning the on-air talent and the forum peoples too. I think Teague still has some of his baby teeth, and Trey is about six minutes from Methuselah. So there are at least two natural points of view on Watchmen: the pre- and post-Cold War perspectives. For my part, I caught just the tail end of the Cold War. Cuba was over, but Afghanistan wasn't, and short-range missiles were in western Europe, and nobody knew anything. There was a very real and tangible chance of nuclear war. There were buttons, and fingers were on them. It was part of the zeitgeist at the time.

The film adaptation of Watchmen did the right thing by making it a period piece, because taking the story out of the Cold War context would have gutted it. But at the same time, I wonder how people born after Gorbachev — hell, maybe even born after the dissolution of the USSR — can really relate to the whole conceit. Does that kind of pessimism seem melodramatic? Cause it is today, for sure. But back then … back then it seemed like history was a sentence, and there was a period at the end of it. We hadn't gotten there yet, but it was coming. Even in the late 1980s we still talked of the year 2000 like it was impossibly distant, because we knew, deep down, there was a very real possibility it would never come. Or rather that it would come, but by then nobody would be keeping calendars any more.

Ultimately, I think Watchmen is a product of its time. That's not a criticism. Just an observation.

1. The pond in Orgrimmar.

2. Where the stream meets the river on the western border of the Grizzly Hills.

3. This little place — whoops. Sorry, guys. Wrong thread.

Hear hear. Come on, Trey. This is a safe place.

And now Disney is, for all intents and purposes, the marketing arm of Pixar.

If the intent of the question was to name the five best sequels that did not, themselves, get subsequently sequelized then Chris coulda said so straight up. Also it would have been a much harder question to answer, at least for me.

And yeah. Who dropped the ball there? We demand a next-top-five!