Watchmen (Page 1 of 2)

Altho it’s a great movie, I don’t buy some of the basic premise. In particular, I object to the idea that destroying several cities could bring about world peace; we already had two wars to end all wars, and it absolutely did not work. Why aren't the smartest, most powerful people in the world smarter than Harry Truman? Why not destroy just the heads of government, with the threat of destroying the next ones too if they don’t disarm?

And I don’t buy your premise that a super-powerful being like Dr. Manhattan would necessarily abandon mankind. Sure, Marlon Brando did it, but most real super-rich people become philanthropists—even tho they know they can't save everyone and their work will never be done.

I think the story would have worked better as two films: one in which Rorschach and Nightowl investigate the murder of the Comedian; and another in which Ozymandias exploits the absence of Dr. Manhattan. More Ozy; less cock. Much less cock.

If Superman were real, he wouldn't get "bored" of saving humanity.  Perhaps you and Trey would, and that's your right, but Clark Kent would not.  And it's not because he's got superpowers and as such doesn't have to be afraid (which isn't true, by the by), it's because if Clark Kent were you and had no superpowers he'd readily dive in front of a train to save a stranger by the very nature of his personality.

I want to have this debate sometime, but I fear it's kind of pointless since you seem to be basing your opinions on Supes on misinformation. 

You seem to have missed the point entirely. WATCHMEN's assertion is that "the nature of [Superman's] personality" is implausible and unrealistic. If a being with his kind of abilities existed, such a being would not be a compassionate Clark Kent/Superman, but a dispassionate, detached demigod, no more likely to throw himself in front of a bus to save a human than a human will throw himself in front of a lawnmower to save an anthill.

Yes, WATCHMEN represents a completely different type of superman (small-S) than the Superman series does. That is the entire point.

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.

Zarban, you have a major flaw in your premise. Dr. Manhattan never worked with Ozy, and probably never would.

"People seem to regard Watchmen as great because it supposedly depicts what would really happen if superheroes were real, but it really depicts more like the worst case scenario of what could happen."

There is a difference between a "Superhero" in the classic sense that we know it, and the superheroes of Watchmen. The superheroes of watchmen are not these shining perfect specimens of the human existence, they are real human beings that simply decided to do this. They are as fucked up as the next guy and they deal with it like any human would (As much as I love Batman, how many people would actually exile themselves for how ever many years and learn to become one with themselves, er whatever actually goes on up there. No, they get shitfaced and scream at the moon.)

I think it's not so much a case of "If superheroes were real, as it is , "what if people tried to be Superheros" (The Doc notwithstanding).

I actually just finished reading the novel (Like yesterday actually) and I thought it was probably one of the coolest things I have ever read. Namely because these are real people aspiring to be something more, and some fail, some succeed, and some just get fucked up beyond any imagining.

"Besides, of all the wars superbeings could win, Vietnam wasn't one of them. Machine guns, explosions, and flame-throwers? That's exactly what US troops used!"

You seem to be missing the part where the Doc was leveling the forest from the roots up. Thus making flamethrowers, explosions and machine guns a little more useful.

I'm sure I have more to say on this, but I can't think of it at the moment.

Agreed. Especially since they already had an ongoing workig relationship in the movie. How much of a stretch would it be for Ozzy to say, "Hey, this energy project thing is going to do a lot of good and all, but how about we do something really big picture?" do you really think Doc would turn him down?

Again, I'm perfectly happy with the portrayal of Doc. He's a guy whose mind has been opened wide, and he has a vastly broader perspective now. But Doc's self-exile isn't really all that well motivated. Remember that Ozy actively conspired to encourage Doc to leave earth; it was required by his crazy-ass plan because he knew Doc would have stopped him. If Doc's presence were required (to succeed with a better plan), he would have conspired to keep Doc on earth.

...By assassinating JFK and doing all of Nixon's dirty work? Marvel superheroes are flawed too. That wasn't new. What was new was the nihilism and the outright mental derangement. Fully half the Watchmen are totally mentally screwed up. Now, you can say if you want that anyone who puts on a mask to fight crime is probably disturbed--and that seems to be Moore's premise--but I say that people that screwed up generally get ostracized and arrested before long.

But maybe not. And maybe they'd decide to support Nixon. And maybe Nixon could get the 22nd amendment repealed and win reelection multiple times if he'd won the Vietnam War and he his scandals had been competently covered up. But that's very bleak. You don't have to be a "shining perfect specimen of the human existence" to not kill JFK and prop up a Nixonian conspiratocracy.

EDIT: Re: leveling the forest. We had a superhero for that. His name was Agent Orange.

Last edited by Zarban (2010-05-17 23:34:42)

But Doc was fighting in Vietnam too. And Nightowl was helping suppress the anti-government rioting. Maybe I read into that too much, but it looked to me like most of the group had been co-opted by the government. And you know Rorschach was up to some crazy shit when no one was looking. He may not have been co-opted but he was certainly an arch-conservative, self-righteous sociopath. Mothman went crazy and got hauled away. Silk Spectre 1 had serious emotional issues; and I think something was up with Hooded Justice that I didn't fully catch.

It was really only Silk Spectre 2 and Nightowl 2 (and I guess Nightowl 1) who were reasonably mentally balanced—and remember how they casually slaughtered several gang members? (Maybe Silhouette was mentally balanced too, but I got a real Madonna vibe from her.)

I don't mean to piss on your love of the film. But I just don't think it's quite the story you want it to be. It's basically a noir mystery. It's about very damaged people doing bad things and trying to get out from under them and mostly not succeeding. That's great and kind of cool, but man is it bleak.

"I don't mean to piss on your love of the film. But I just don't think it's quite the story you want it to be. It's basically a noir mystery. It's about very damaged people doing bad things and trying to get out from under them and mostly not succeeding. That's great and kind of cool, but man is it bleak."

Dude, this is WHY I love it.

You say it's bleak that that somehow makes it not worth watching or invalid. That what I am having a hard time understanding. That's the point of the series/movie. It's the story of these normal people (Granted some of them arn't probably the most balanced, but then you get the entire range of the spectrum too) who either decided to become superheroes or get forced into it. And it's the story of them in a cold war environment (And you expect a happy go lucky story perhaps?) dealing with trying to be these people and dealing with the world they live in.

No, no. It's a great movie, and I love noir. It's not bad that it's bleak, but it's just not a story about regular people trying to make the world a better place. It's about screwed up people who aren't really equipped to cope in society so they try to change society, and it ends horribly because they're screwed up people.

My only real problem with the film is that I do not believe that the smartest man in the world would come up with the plan he comes up with. Well, that and the idea that masked vigilantes would support Nixon.

Last edited by Zarban (2010-05-18 03:49:01)

Not necessarily, it's just not straightforward storytelling. Which is much harder to do well, but is not automatically bad storytelling.

And I meant protagonist. I suppose you could consider this a pointless semantic argument, but the definition of the protagonist is the prime mover of the events of the story. Since it's Ozzy's plan and he's the one causing these events, he's more of the protagonist, while Night Owl and Rorschach (and the others) are his antagonists.

Kind of. I think if you asked Ozzy, he would say he was making a genuine self sacrifice. Taking on the heavy burden of being responsible for so much evil in an effort to accomplish even more good.

Well, presumably Ozzy had some way of propagating his own version of events, namely that Doc was "warning" humanity and that we better shape up. Given Ozzy's mastery of the media, it's hardly a stretch to think he could influence public opinion that way.

Yeah, except for the Japanese (and German and Italian)-American citizens we threw into work camps because we were mad at them for taking our jobs.