Right, but it's still a miserable idea for me to kill their grandmas. I should obviously kill Teague and Brian themselves. (And Kissinger! Don't forget Kissinger!) Or better still take their weapons away. Human nature or not, George Washington and George III did not start a nuclear war.

But it's also actually NOT human nature. In the twenty or so years since Watchmen was published, we've stood well down from nuclear war and probably will never use nuclear weapons (we've done a pretty good job avoiding nerve gas and such). It really was Nixon (a few like him) that was the problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh yeah. What am I thinking of, then? The new Exorcist or Amityville movies maybe. The new Omen was a little later.

I had the chance to see Constantine in a sneak peek before release and passed. Keanu in yet another satan-nearly-produces-the-antichrist movie around the same time as Schwarzenegger's End of Days? Ugh. Didn't Michael Biehn sort that all out in The Seventh Sign ten years earlier?

But I saw it several months ago and thought it was pretty good—despite the fact that it features both Keanu and Shia, which is like having two puppies in a movie that isn't about puppies.

It occurs to me that, as Trey explained the connections between the Wild Wild West and Star Trek TV shows in your WWW commentary, there is an interesting comparison to be made between Star Trek (2009) and the Wild Wild West movie.

- Based on buddy adventure TV show but played more for laffs
- Turned into odd-couple wunza movie + hot ethnic chick (one's a scrapper; one's a scientist)
- The scrapper is named Jim; the scientist has a weird name
- Hot ethnic chick is of zero value in resolving the plot
- One of the main characters has lost his family to the villain's evil scheme
- Villain is played with American accent by non-American
- Gratuitous anti-racism notes in the story
- Thanagarian Snare Beast
- Guy in wheelchair
- Scientist character comes face to face with "himself"
- Villain captures the heroes' boss and tries to destroy their homeland
- Climactic fist fight on vehicle with precarious footing

If only Spock and Kirk dressed up as women at some point, that would clinch it.

I thought you guys made a valiant attempt to see the good in this mess. I walked out (of the 2D version) just going "meh" and likening it to Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai, which was a lot better and didn't have all the white guilt (or the same kind of white guilt, anyway). Only later, when other people started gushing over it, did I start to hate it. And then when I saw District 9, I really hated Avatar.

You guys didn't do much of a comparison, but the films actually tread a lot of the same ground. But District 9 deals with it in fairly realistic terms, with aliens who are really alien and not blue Elves.

BTW, giving the bad guy his own, different avatar would have crossed the line into Zarban's Fuckin' Cool Extrapolation(TM): In a world where X happens, this story is about X to the Xth power! Example: In a world where a clan of vampires stalks the night, Wesley Snipes is a half-vampire vampire hunter... because that's fuckin' cool!

Okay, I've listened to it now (without watching at the same time, which is really rare for me). It starts out as the pointless argument that I figured it was, but gets better once everyone calms down a little.

Rebooting the series by creating a new timeline was ingenious. But the film is basically fan fiction with all the trimmings, and Kirk is Mary Sue.

Oh, and I totally am a racist. Short people got no reason to live.

This will be interesting to revisit. I haven't seen it since I walked out of the theater at the end in 1992, disappointed. I was hot for another Aliens, as was the entire rest of the world, and Fincher was clearly trying to shift the tone again. But it didn't help that this was yet another film that starts out by saying, "You know how the previous film ended? Yeah, I'm throwin' that out."