Watchmen or "Who'd want to even save a world with a 5-term Nixon, anyway?"

[Blue_Tires]

My comments and questions (Disclaimer -- I haven't read comics since I was a kid, I had not even heard of Watchmen until a year ago, and I have no pressing desire to go back and read the entire series.) As usual, spoilers below...

1. As some others have mentioned, I also thought the soundtrack was lacking -- There is a lot of potential nostalgic fun you can have with a 70s/80s soundtrack if you want to take a little time...Sadly, most of the songs were groan-worthy and straight from standard-issue Hollywood. I never even notice soundtracks unless they are really good or really bad, and this could have been so much better...

2. Is that the Comedian who shot Kennedy in the beginning? And whatever made the Comedian a 'hero' anyway; much less be part of a hero team? There were no redeeming qualities about him in the movie, so why would anyone on the team tolerate having him around?

3. What's the purpose of Nixon outlawing heroes, and what kind of bizarro alternate reality would still have him president halfway into the 80s unless he was fixing elections?

4. What plot purpose was served by revealing who Silk Spectre's real father was?

5. For all the talk about how complex the characters were supposed to be, I didn't see it at all -- All I saw were charcter and character types I've seen in a million other movies...However, the ambiguous morality behind the characters and storyline I thought was very complex and that was what I found at the same time refreshing and unsettling...

6. My rating: 3 stars out of 4 -- it really keeps you thinking...I've been able to erase some questions as I was typing just by thinking differently...

[Blue_Tires]

1. forgot to ask:

what the fuck was that weirdo panther with horns that Ozy had??

and WHEN will this director fall out of love with the "slow-down super slo-mo, then speed up, then freeze-frame and then alternate among the three" method of doing action scenes?? that shit was played out even before "The Matrix"

[orestes]

2. As far as Nixon becoming a 5 term president,

it had to do with him winning the Vietnam War, in large part due to the help of Dr. Manhattan. He became popular enough to have the 22nd amendment repealed.

The cat is an artifact left over from the comic ending, should have been removed completely since they went with an alternate ending.

[Blue_Tires]

3. o.k., but why did the cat have horns

and what was that huge contraption Manhattan built on Mars?

[MilesColtrane]

5. Ozymandias was conducting advanced genetic engineering experiments...

...for a reason that got cut out of the movie. (so I've heard)
The feline Bubastis was one of the results of this experimentation.

The Mars device was for transporting Laurie around the planet. (Every time he teleported her she became violently ill, so he thoughtfully provided her with a less sickening mode of travel.)

In the book, Manhattan was giving her the tour of Mars to try to get her to see things from his perspective. His contention was that human life should hold no more significance than any other highly ordered material in the universe...the inanimate, "magnificent desolation" of the red planet being the closest example he had at hand.

[baldguy]

4. Read the book.

The movie left 75% of the story out.

[CJCRANE]

6. They're not really "heroes".

They're vigilantes or operatives. Also you have to remember that it was written 25 years ago, a long time before the whole superhero tale as soap opera became commonplace in TV and movies.

I agree with you about the music though. My guess is they were the placeholder tracks for the rough edit and were kept in for some reason (maybe they were the director's favorite tunes or they didn't have time to re-edit the music).

[Blue_Tires]

7. ugh...after trying to sleep last night

and trying to scrub my brain of visions of pool room rape, I've decided to downgrade my rating to 2.5 stars out of 4...This story is way to cynical and characters too flawed to make proper sense of...

[Orsino]

8. SPOILERS HERE

1. I liked the soundtrack okay, but i rarely pay much attention to such things. I liked the Cohen, though it pales in comparison to Rufus Wainwright's version.

2. Yes, that was the Comedian shooting Kennedy. He wasn't a hero in the conventional sense of the word--just a super-badass who believed in nothing much. Killing him off early made perfect sense to me. He did have at least three redeeming points, however:

A willingness and ability to help fight crime, presumably a long time ago and long since compromised.

Some sort of affection for his daughter, probably. It's a neat trick played on the audience, I think. His cozying up to Laurie is supposed to be merely creepy, based on what we know of the attempted rape, but is cast in a different light when he's revealed as the father. This assumes that he was aware.

Some introspection and regret for what he'd become a week before his death, seen in his drunken ramblings to Moloch. It's saved as the last revelation of his character because it does the most to overturn our expectations. It shows that his cynicism wasn't absolute, that he had some notion of decency after all.

3. It wasn't just Nixon outlawing masks; Congress passed the Keene Act. I've seen enough X-Men to know that this was inevitable. We outlaw people who are too different; it just takes us longer to make up our minds when they don't actually have super powers, and have been useful (and role-models) for decades.

4. The paternity revelation solves the mystery of the elderly Silk Specter's strange serenity over the Comedian's death. It explains her change in attitude toward her would-be rapist, and opens the door for Laurie's similar acceptance, which in turn dovetails nicely with Manhattan's rediscovery of the beauty and significance of life.

5. Yeah, it's a big story, so we didn't get a whole lot of depth to every character--but that ambiguity kept 'em all interesting, in my opinion. Even that ludicrously bad Nixon impersonator came across as a bad caricature--which in a way was what the real Nixon became in our world.

6. I might give it four stars, personally. I'm not a fan of costumed superheroes as a rule, but Watchmen nicely extrapolates the sorts of personalities that might don the tights, and what might become of a world that has them in it. It's not done from purely altruistic motives, and the ones who pursue whatever-it-is the most singlemindedly are the crazy ones (Rorschach and maybe Mothman). The ones with the greatest apparent detachment, Manhattan and Ozymandias, are the ones who nearly get everyone wiped out. Everything is ultimately revealed as part of Oz' plot, but he succeeds, we can tell ourselves, because as he says he made himself feel every death he caused. It's a terrible arithmetic, and it's presented well, in my opinion, with the payoff held until the very last possible moment. The most normal of the heroes are Laurie and Dan, and it's fitting that they get to close the movie. The acting is generally fine, though Laurie was pretty terrible in earlier scenes and the Nixon impression was painful.

[Blue_Tires]

9. thanks...i forgot one more thing

who killed the women in the beginning (with the spray-paint of "lesbian whores"?)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

10. It never gets solved, not even in the book.

They, along with Mothman and Dollar Bill, are tertiary characters. They're there, mostly, to drive the point that superheroing tends to have an even higher casualty rate that 1960's Formula One racing.

[Orsino]

13. Ah. Glad I wasn't missing anything important there. n/t

[Orsino]

12. Not sure.

If that were the work of a name, surely they would have shown us whodunit? I don't recall anyone specifically connected to the deaths (doesn't seem like Rorschach's style); perhaps it was just meant to show us a tawdry "fall" of Silhouette consistent with fifties mores? With no more meaning than the breakdown of Mothman or the death of Dollar Bill?

I guess we're being shown that most of the masks died or retired ignobly.

[Deep13]

11. There's a spoiler in your title, dumbass!

[Orsino]

14. Well, nothing you can't get from turning on the TV. n/t

[Blue_Tires]

15. last questions...well i guess these are more like plot holes...

1. WHY would Dr. Manhattan help Nixon win Vietnam? Aside from the Comedian, none of the Watchmen seemed overly patriotic, and they ALL had to know how dirty Nixon was (especially the so-called 'smartest man in the world') -- So why do all his dirty work?

2. WHY all the conservative angst in the midst of a five-term Nixon reign? I'd thought his rule and the totalitarian beatdown given to hippies and leftists (including assassinations abroad) would have kept right wingers happy...But Rosarch sounds as resentful as Travis Bickle stuck in traffic at a combination May Day/Black Panther/Gay Pride/Mardi Gras parade...and why is there a RW neo-nazi publication smack dab in the middle of New York of all places?

3. WHY didn't Dr. Manhattan stop the shooting of the Vietnamese girl? I'm thinking it's some kind of allegory about God indifferently standing by while atrocities happen, but that's all I can come up with -- I did notice a very agnostic/atheist theme running through the entire plot...

4. The biggest hole: Knowing what we know about Nixon, Kissinger, and his other military advisors, WHY was Ozy so sure that Nixon would call for peace after the New York disaster instead of using it as justification for a pre-emptive strike?? Remember, he was just a turn of the key of a pre-emptive strike even before the disaster...And don't tell me Kissinger and the war hawks on the Joint Chiefs wouldn't have pressed Nixon for war anyway...

[Orsino]

16. More spoilers.

1. I'm guessing that this was a relic of Manhattan's humanity. He still felt some patriotic obligation to win a war, and might even have done the math: a relatively few quick deaths could destroy the Communists' will to fight and end the conflict sooner. There's also the thought that the war might have looked more winnable when he joined up then it turned out to be in practice, and that Manhattan was simply following through, with some reluctance. Nixon, we assume, was not revealed in the world of Watchmen (the Comedian did away with Woodward and Bernstein, it is hinted) as the pathetic, corrupt creature we know.

2. We know that conservatism is never happy. It runs on fear and ignorance, and so always needs an enemy. It's quick to blame its own victims. The uncompromising Rorschach can't be everywhere at once, so there is always more filth around the corner--which in turn hardens his resolve.

3. I don't see it as a god allegory so much as a map of human failure; this incident was a glimpse of an earlier stage of his detachment from mortal affairs. The accident that expanded his awareness also made him less able to care about us. It's a paradox that can only be resolved by Manhattan's departure at the end of the story.

4. I believe that the reactors were exploding all over the world, and Ozymandias was careful to leave Manhattan's fingerprints, so to speak, on the disasters. Oz "saved" the world by giving it a single enemy, one they had already been coached into hating (over the cancer thing).

[Orrex]

17. Haven't seen the film, but Answer 4 wasn't in the book IIRC

Is that how it went down in the movie? An interesting addition to the plot, I think!

[Orsino]

19. Yeah.

All the ambiguity that Moore put in would have been pretty damned unsatisfying to many, I'm guessing. I don't mind the cleaned-up ending to the movie.

[FedUpWithIt All]

18. SPOILER:We really disliked this movie. It is slow, self important and the story...

is badly outdated.

The overall threats seemed tame by modern standards and the "solution" was too lazy and "simple" considering the (slow and excruciatingly long) grandiose self analysis of many of the characters. Achingly bad considering we had to endure them monologuing their conciet for over 2 hours prior. UGH.

Mankind is not better due to it's common focus. If anything, these grand beings should KNOW that humans have very short attention spans and would quickly resume their focus on each other. Ridiculous ending. Insulting. We could barely sit though the movie and when it finally reached the "We have to kill people to save people" meme we just looked at each other jaws agape and asked, "is that IT? This is the resolution? We endured all the angst and narcissistic self analysis for...this?" I was offended by the self-congratulatory tone of the Uber-genius and the invincible man as they wrote off all of mankind's problems with a "solution" that could have been conceived by the cranky pre-teen-aged boy next door.

In addition to the self absorbed ranting, the awkward attempts at sex, the infuriating ending, we had to endure the "rescue scenes". A burning building with a conveniently placed water tower on the roof. The victims of this terrible fire courteously gathered in a single room so as to save time for the rescuer to get back to her over-long make out session. The second, in a :scared: scary prison. It is a good thing that this rescue is taking place because the Rorschach character is in REAL DANGER from the "little person" and his two big and scary cohorts. Wait, make that ONE big scary guy. I am not quite sure WHY the "little" guy decided to eliminate one of the two big scary guys himself but that leaves only one big scary guy as the rest of the prisoners do not seem overly interested in Rorschach who apparently put many of them into prison. :shrug:


:eyes:
The Rorschach character had some real substance and held true to it until the end. The acting of Patrick Wilson was ok and the early moments were hopeful. Otherwise, this felt like a self stroke and i feel as if i accidentally stumbled on it. Awkward and embarrassing and a total waste of my time.

[Initech]

20. My favorite thing was (spoilers)

At the end of the movie when the reporter says they've got nothing to report on and the boss says "well make something up". And the reporter mentions that Reagan is going to run for president in '88 and the boss says "nah, let's report on some real issues." :rofl: