I had to look him up. According to wikipedia, at one point he’s said to be an avatar of Shiva. If they kept that up, in a serious way, I’d have to call that a super power. Now if it was just his trainer’s opinion. . . .
And, coming back around, Ozymandias was originally Thunderbolt: a top martial artist who’d honed his mind and body to peak condition and could maybe pull off one borderline superhuman athletic feat per adventure. Like, imagine the archetypal 90-pound mother who gets a freaky adrenaline rush when she absolutely needs to lift that car off her kid – and now imagine a muscular kung-fu expert who can, by concentrating really hard for a moment or two, dial up that level of performance at will.
So he usually gets by as a superhero in the Batman/Mister Terrific mold – but if he ever needs to, say, pull off a jump guys like that can’t quite hit, well, that’s okay, so long as he’s not trying to leap tall buildings in a single bound; he can maybe set a new world record in the high jump by a couple of feet, but that’s about it.
And so it’s supposed to be almost, but not quite, a superpower: it’s not that he’s from Krypton or got bitten by a radioactive spider, it’s that anyone who eats right and gets plenty of exercise can do what he does via self-hypnosis given enough years practicing meditation techniques. So, okay: given enough time to fire up a focused HIII-YAAA, he can (a) barely manage to get shot in the hand instead of the gut, and then (b) explain while bleeding that even he wasn’t sure he could do that.
I think that’s taking his account of himself too much at face value. An equally plausible reading is that he’s a psychopathic narcissist who – rather than use his intelligence and resources to defuse the international tensions he clearly anticipated – has spent the last twenty years exacerbating them (to his own personal financial benefit), so that he can play out his fantasy role as a second Alexander, and cut the Gordian Knot.
I agree with this assessment. For Dr Manhattan, these were mere trivialities, whether Ozy did that or not wasn’t important to him, the end result that humanity was saved was all that was important. To us, that might not be so cut and dry.
But that version has problems of its own- why is there a group of non-super powered people (a teenage girl, no less)going around fighting crime in tights with nothing but their fists? Criminals have guns. Its never adequately explained in the graphic novel why the non-supered Watchmen aren’t all carrying firearms and body armor themselves. The premise is completely ridiculous, unless they all have Batman-level martial arts training, acrobatics, stealthiness, non-lethal projectile weaponry, and a similar psychological adversion to guns. And even Batman had body armor.
The movie version seems to give the Watchmen quasi-super strength and acrobatics to avoid the same logical pitfall as the graphic novel. But I agree, in doing so, it weakens the uniqueness of Manhattan and the resulting plot.
No tip from Viedt - one of the detectives knew that Dan was Nite Owl 2, and kept it to himself (he even visited Dan’s place earlier in the book). After the jail break he could no longer ignore it.
Oh, and Viedt doesn’t catch the assassin’s bullet - he just takes him down after his assistant (and Lee Iacocca, in the movie) are shot. When Dan asks what he would have done if the assassin had shot at him first, instead of the assistant, he states “I suppose I’d have to catch the bullet, wouldn’t I?”
The simple reason why the costumed adventurers in the Watchmen wear tights instead of body armour and use their fists instead of guns is that they’re superheroes in a superhero comic. No other explanation is necessary or, indeed, possible. Without that central conceit, the whole thing falls apart.
I know that Watchmen has sometimes been described as “superheroes in the real world”, but that isn’t really accurate. Moore has (and had already at the time he wrote Watchmen) written stories with settings much closer to “real life”, and it’s clear by comparison that that isn’t what he intended here. His aim in Watchmen was to take as his initial premise a world of comic-book heroes, and apply plausible, consistent consquences to it within that comic-book setting.
This is, in fact, one of the major criticisms of the movie: a large part of the point of Watchmen is that it is a comic, exploring and commenting on the themes and forms of comics. Any adaptation to another medium inevitably loses that connection.
While that’s true, there is a certain internal logic to it. For most of them, the reasons they went into the hero business were to do good. Good guys capture the bad guys (perhaps pummelling them a bit in the process) and deliver them to justice. Amoral vigilantes just shoot people. It’s a romantic notion that the original Minutemen and some of the later crowd subscribed to - if you want to be the good guy, you can’t go around shooting people. The tights and outfits were a nod to the comic book heroes they were emulating.
Obviously there are some exceptions: The Comedian does in fact wear armor, carry guns and shoot people (with government sanction); Rorschach has no qualms about killing but strikes me as preferring the hands-on approach to inflicting justice to shooting from a distance; Night Owl has a whole array of non-lethal devices (in proper Batman fashion) that render the need for conventional weapons superfluous; and Dr Manhattan doesn’t need them (and didn’t really want to be a superhero in the first place). I don’t know about Ozy although it was probably the romantic notion at first as well as projecting the right image, and also an intellectual conceit that he could take on the villains without guns.
Also, at the very end of the comic Silk Spectre II announces that she’s giving up the flimsy costume - stylistically inherited from her mother, who was doing it for the glam factor - and adopting the leather armor and gun approach of her father instead.
The problem I have with the ending in both the movie and comic is that they never answer what comes next. Russia and the US were pretty united as separate countries against each other. Ozzy gave them a common enemy, thereby ending their desire to kill each other. He didn’t bring peace, he gave them a common enemy. As Jim Gordon says at the end of Batman Begins: “What about escalation? We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds.” Now the world knows that killing each other with nukes isn’t the answer, they need to start finding something bigger and badder to kill the aliens/Manhattan with. And to me this is worse, since there isn’t a real enemy to fight, once these superweapons are created somebody is going to get bored and the world is going to end again.
Also, Manhattan may not care about justice, but he cares about himself. Just vaporize Ozzy like he vaporized you. It isn’t like they needed him, even if Ozzy is smarter than Doc, Doc is plenty smart enough for what needs to be done.
Well, they don’t answer the question of what comes next, but they address it. The first thing out of Veidt’s mouth after the masterstroke is “I did it. I DID IT! I saved earth from hell. Next, I’ll help her towards utopia.”
Laurie interrupts him. “Wait a minute. Next?”
But he’s already on about why they’ve all got to keep quiet about what just happened, and so he doesn’t then elaborate. He did, however, go into more detail earlier in the story; it’s the whole point of that new Millennium line he’s going to market to the heck out of, when he contends that a new surge of social optimism (a) is likely and (b) necessitates new imagery projecting a vision of a technological utopia that’s just within reach. He repeatedly emphasizes that his new world will still demand heroism – indeed, will still need heroes as badly as it did before – but a less obvious heroism.
As the events of November 2nd dwindle down, the panelists on news programs are already talking about how the creature apparently died upon accidentally breaching our dimension, such that further attacks aren’t thought to be imminent; it’s likened unto an alien bee, not very intelligent, that stings reflexively upon death. And while that already sounds more like a problem to be helped away than one to be hit with superweapons, everyone is still putting up Accord posters and sending each other Accord cards months later – and Veidt is advertising his new “social optimism” brand with gusto. And all we actually see along the way is talk of elation, plus some doomsday graffiti being scrubbed away, and united flags over by the new Burgers ‘n’ Borscht place, and even the vaguely ominous mmeltdown candies have been replaced by cheery sunbursts, and Redford’s talking about getting active in politics, and –
– look, they’re not exactly hunkering down for a bleak fight to the death. It’s more like earth got saved from hell, which cleared the way for something else to happen next; it’ll take work, but he’s on it; he’s not expecting the first part to get the job done all by itself, and so is plugging away on his next project.
I dunno, my first impression of him in the comic was pretty low. I seem to remember thinking to myself, “A guy who strews action figures of himself all over his desk must be a pretty major douche.”
Yeah he came across as a bit of a douche in the comic–but that’s different from being a colossal prick.
Don’t forget that Manhattan is a strict determinist. He can’t pulp Adrian because he didn’t pulp Adrian when he looked into his future. He feels obligated to play things out as he saw himself play them out.