I went with the Objectivists yesterday to see the Watchmen movie.  There was a fairly wide range of taste in movies represented in our little group, but this movie was hated universally.  (Diana, for reals.  This one is horrid.)

The story picks up in an alternative reality from our own in which the US won the Vietnam War, Nixon had been re-elected for a zillion terms, and a former superhero called the Comedian is mysteriously murdered.  One hero who refused to hang up his cape when vigilantism was outlawed, Rorschach, investigates the murder.  Another hero, Dr. Manhattan, who is nearly omnipotent, blue, and naked most of the time, gets dumped by his girlfriend, Laurie Jupiter, and is then accused of giving people cancer leaves the planet to float around Mars in a giant glass thing.  Then there is an apparent murder attempt on another hero, Ozymandias, and Rorschach becomes convinced that there is a plot to kill off all the former heroes, the Watchmen.

Rorschach gets framed for murder (not that he was opposed to hurting, maiming, or killing people) and sent to jail.  Laurie Jupiter runs straight into the arms of another one of the former Watchmen and they put their costumes on and start saving people again.  Then, they decide to break Rorschach out of prison because they are also convinced that there is some big plot against them happening.

Ultimately, they find out that Ozymandias is behind the plot, but it's not a plot to kill them.  He just had to kill them because they would get in his way for creating world peace.  See, he sets off a big, nuclear explosion in New York, this framing Dr. Manhattan for the disaster.  This causes Russian and the USA to put aside their differences in order to protect the world from Dr. Manhattan.

I was concerned about this movie because I recently read the graphic novel and I guessed -- rightly as it turns out -- that if the movie was anything like that, then it would be an awful movie.  The movie is pretty faithful to the comic book.  The dialogue matches word-for-word in many places throughout the movie.

The movie, like the comic, is really a nihilistic attack on heroes.  We are repeatedly shown how not only do they have lots of problems, psychological woes, personal drama, and baggage, their status as heroes alienates them from regular human beings.  In the case of Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg they cannot even relate to one another as human beings.  It's only as caped crusaders that they connect to one another.  If humans have problems to match their inner and outer conflicts and contradictions, then the people we call heroes are even worse because they lack humanity in proportion to their "heroic" status and power.

I've heard complaints about the acting in the movie, but I didn't find any of the performances particularly distracting.

What was distracting was Billy Crudup's large, blue, glowing wang.  I knew Dr. Manhattan spent most of his time naked (symbolic of his distance from the rest of humanity) but I was still surprised by the amoung of time that penis spent on the screen.

The movie is very slow and boring.  So was the comic book.  I think if you haven't read the comic, then there will be elements of the movie that seem strange and disconnected from the story.

But it's a hideous movie.  I can't possibly recommend that anyone go see it.

Posted by: Flibbertigibbet at 01:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Category: State of the Arts
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