But Doc Manhattan isn’t motivated by heroism. He’s detached from his human origins. When Ozzy uses the intrinsic field on him he reforms and says, “Reassembling myself was the first trick I learned. It didn’t kill Osterman. Did you really think it would kill me?”
He doesn’t consider himself the same being as Osterman.
As an aside, if there were to be a postscript for Watchmen, I want it to be that Doc didn’t destroy Rorschach, he disrupted his intrinsic field, so that for the next twenty years he’s been putting his body back together, not like Osterman did with watchmaker’s precision, but with insane determination. I want a near-omnipotent Rorschach.
Ok, I can sort of see that. But what about the other three? Why did they stop trying to kill him as soon as his plan succeeded? Even if they agreed with him, that doesn’t change what he did.
Incidentally, that’s one thing I liked about the end of the latest X-Men film.
Because they knew at that point that they couldn’t do it even if they tried. He’d previously fought off Nite Owl and Rorschach on his own and when Silk Spectre tried to shoot him, he caught the bullet. You can add to that the combination of horror at what he’d done and realizing that he’d outmaneuvered them- and that he was right when he pointed out they couldn’t expose him. If all of that wasn’t enough, Dr. Manhattan could have stopped them just as easily.
I doubt I’m the first to have said it but I have posted the “Watchmen is a comic book about comic books” comment on this board in the past.
The point is that Watchmen was amazing in 1986 if you were somebody who read hundreds of superhero comic books since 1963. It took all of the unspoken cliches of the genre and held them up to the light of the real world. It basically pointed out that a person who dressed up like a bat every night so he could beat up criminals or an alien who had the power to push the earth out of orbit were not going to be sane rational normal people. If you hadn’t become a superhero because you were already borderline crazy then being a superhero drove you borderline crazy.
Once people like Alan Moore and Frank Miller and Bill Willingham pointed this out, the genre changed. We now expect comic book superheroes to be a bit off so their ideas are now as cliched as the ideas they were deconstructing.
It was mediocre, but delivered one of my all-time favorite tough-guy lines: *None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with ME!
Ok, can I say one thing about this movie that really bugged me?
I’m fine with the deeper meaning, the comic book setting, the fantastic plots, the characters, and the general world that this is set in. Whether I liked that or not, it was necessary for the story to play it the way it did
But for god sakes, if its supposed to be a comic book with super heroes that dress up like furries and/or strippers, then I wished that at least all of them (with the exception of Dr. M) had more definable super powers.
In the movie, and I don’t know about the comic, these people were basically like oddly dressed enhanced humans. There was no reason, then, for the Owl to dress and ride around in an Owl, he could have called himself the Armadillo and it would have made little difference. With a mask like Rorschach, he could have had the ability like a chameleon. Silk Spectre could have been able to fly around like a ghost and pass through walls. Basically, they acted and dressed like super powered characters but without some defining power and that bugs me that Moore couldn’t have thrown us a little eye candy while he was writing it. There was absolutely no reason Ozymandias named himself that or should dress like that. I spent half the movie trying to figure out of the Comedian said anything funny! At least give him a Joker-like tendency to kill people using clownish gags or something!
Yog, then you missed the entire point of the story.
These are not super heroes. They are a bunch of deranged, damaged, sad little people who get their kicks dressing like comic-book characters and playing hero.
Dr. Manhattan is the first and only super-powered being. He is the game changer.
In the comic, they don’t even come across as “enhanced”.
Those scenes where Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre effortlessly beat the hell out of a dozen guys, breaking their bones and dropping would-be gunmen? In the comic, the first fight has our heroes gasping for breath after dropping three guys with moves out of a self-defense class; the second has 'em dropping all of two guys; nary a gun in sight either time.
It was explained that Ozzy was a lonely kid with a sky-high IQ who grew up idolizing Alexander the Great; while a teen he retraced the guy’s footsteps – following the path of that war machine while pondering military tactics and lateral thinking at every step, gathering martial-arts techniques along the way, and ultimately winding up disillusioned when he reached the point where Alexander died and the unity he’d built failed to survive him – at which point our hero experimented with hashish in Egypt and became inspired by the wisdom of the Pharaohs, who’d built an enduring system that encouraged intellectual magnificence. He thus eventually “required preparation for the day when I’d assume the aspect of kingly Rameses, leaving Alexander the adventurer and his trappings to gather dust.”
The idea is that he thinks everything is a joke, and to his mind, he’s just playing along with it – parodying it, even – as a deliberately amoral guy who reflects the true face of the twentieth century like a funhouse mirror. (And, as with Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre, he doesn’t really have any physical feats in the comic that match his performance in the movie; he mostly just shoots people.)
Since the movie came out I have learned to accept that other people for the most part can’t appreciate a plot and pace like in Watchmen. I have only been so impressed by a movie production before a couple of times. There are sequences in the film you just will not get anywhere else. Manhattan’s Origin sequence for example is so beautiful it often brings tears to my eyes. The pacing, the musical composition of the shifting scenes and the monologue. Humans adapt to enjoy what they have already enjoyed. Watchmen doesnt hit the proper beats to strike a chord in most. It’s beautiful in the sadness it reflects about how the real world works and how monstrous it is. It’s characters are lonely and alienated. There is more that’s real in them than you’ll get in any other comic movie and it’s not even close.
Also, in the comic books, unlike in the movie, they are hardly enhanced, just well trained fighters with gadgets.
There’s a wonderful scene when Silk Specter and Nite Owl fight a bunch of knot tops by going after the eyes and the balls, not by having superstrength, and once the fight is over, they stay panting out of breath for a couple of panels.
Of course Snyder had to go and give them neo-like powers.
Right, they’re not “really” super-heroes. They’re costumed vigilantes. Like Batman without the fabulous levels of wealth to finance kick-ass gadgets. And now they’re middle-aged, forced into retirement, gaining a paunch, losing muscle tone, not quite as fast or strong.
You know, super-heroes of our real world.
Ozymandias? He’s smart, staying in shape - he’s the one with the fuckload of cash, which helps a ton. He survives an assassination attempt through sheer awesomeness, but it was staged as part of his plot anyway.
The true oddball is Dr. Manhattan, of course. Symbolic of our nuclear fears, of the spectre of the Cold War. He loses anything resembling humanity. He refers to his former self as if he was a third person. He alienates everyone around him by his utter detachment.
It’s a very pretty movie. As one reviewer noted, it’s damned impressive what all was included - awkward sex, a hard R rating for a superhero film, unflinching moral yuckiness, mostly no-name actors, a villain getting away with it, and so on. The soul wasn’t there in my opinion. It was like Dr. Manhattan was trying to transmute the comic into the film, and got the shiny bits in place but not the real humanity of it.
I almost cried when I saw the initial trailers; it’s like that world was right there, shining on screen for me. But it all went thud when I started actually watching the film itself.
Alan Moore doesn’t really approve of his works being turned into films; the mediums are so different. I really understand why with this film.
Ok, that makes more sense to me, someone who’s only familiar with the movie. I got from the movie that they were trying to do some kind of “super beings are like everyone else” thing while still having super powers
In restrospect I did kind of miss the point of the movie then. I wanted to see Nite Owl commanding a legion of owls, not a furry-suited pudgy middle-aged guy with no reason to dress like that
Seriously? That would be terrifying…as if Rorschach wasn’t sociopathic enough.
I disagree, assuming you’re saying that Watchmen has nothing to offer to a modern audience. I’ve never been a fan of comic books, and I only just picked up Watchmen a couple of weeks ago, and I loved it. I loved the layers within layers, the back and forth method of storytelling, the well-deep discussion of backstory, the interleaving of prose and panels. I loved it. It reminded me a lot of Homestuck, in its complexity at least.
One thing that ran through the comic book series was scenes of various ordinary people on the streets; a schoolkid, a newsstand dealer, a taxi driver. They would only appear in a panel or two, saying something about the main story. In one sense they were sort of expository - they were offered a man-in-the street’s eye view of what the superheroes we’re doing. But we’d see them in issue after issue and they gradually were filled in as characters - we learned their names, we learned about their families and where they grew up. And I think Moore was making a subtle point - it wasn’t just a world of superheroes. It was a world where billions of ordinary people lived too and they’re more than just background props in a story about a superhero fighting a supervillain.
But all these characters were cut from the movie. In the movie, it was just a story about superheroes. Ozymandius may have killed ten million people but we didn’t know any of their names.
I just dont agree. As far as Alan moore and his stuff being made into movies well thats his issue, and I don’t think it would matter how well something was translated, he still wouldn’t approve. To him his stuff is pure as a GN and anything derivative just cheapens it. I understand hedging in that direction but my experience with a story is my own beyond the writer.
I think the twinkly soul thing people are looking for is just what i already discussed. We look for familiar patterns and without their use its like watching an opera instead of a film assuming you had no ability to appreciate opera. I cant listen to mariachi music, some people love it, to me its jut incessant noise. I’ve watched it dozens of times in all its versions and lacking soul is the last thing i could say about it. We all like the kiddy feeling of watching heath ledger perform the Joker or Neo battling an army of Mr. Smiths or whichever scenes do it for you. Saving the girl, sacrificing oneself, one man against many, Luke crying, “Youre not my father!” ect. Its all variations on themes that go back to the bible.
In any case I dont need the agreement of others and dont expect it. I love the film just like I love the GN, though as separate things who’s mutual existence make both better.
Ozymandias is the only one other than Doctor Manhattan that approaches superhuman ability in the comic. I assume he’s basically at the peak of human perfection ( at least for his age ), sort of an all-around Olympic level super-soldier-formula type. Which is how he is able to barely catch/deflect a low-caliber bullet with his body, partially to his own surprise, which really should be pretty close to flat-out impossible.
So in the comic he still beats Rorshach and Nite-Owl with ease, but it is all taken down a degree. Basically a superbly conditioned peak athlete easily beating up two aging tough guys who are otherwise normal. As opposed to the junior-grade Flash imitation in the movie, which I thought was a little overdone