Watchmen

Rorschach's Journal: October 12th 1985 - Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... And I'll look down and whisper "no".

I've been eagerly anticipating this movie for months already! At first, I thought that it's gonna be released in June but then I suddenly realised a few days ago that Americans loved to put their months first before the days, so in fact, it's actually released on 6th March rather than 3rd June..lol. I first came across Watchmen when a Muse forum posted that the band's song "Take a Bow" was featured at the trailer. Haha..it's an appropriate band for an appropriate movie btw. It sparked my interest once again when I saw the trailer while watching Underworld 3. So, I started doing a little research before hand and found out that it's a graphic novel laced with lots of philosophical, sociological and ethical concepts. It's also a literature masterpiece to some extent. That was enough to get me interested..haha. So, when Charles invited me to watch it on Monday, I was very glad indeed.

First of all, in order to appreciate the movie, several stuff needs to be cleared. For those expecting Watchmen to be like the typical superhero movies of X-Men, Spiderman or Fantastic Four, they are gonna be very dissapointed. If the Dark Knight is considered to be the most philosophical movie up to date, then Watchmen trounces it flat big time. It helps alot if the audience have some historical knowledge about the Cold War era and perhaps some amount of English Literature before watching the movie. Trust me, if you're equipped with those information and knowledge, you will find the movie overflowing with the richness of conceptual ideas that could fill hundreds of pages of commentary. I have a feeling that History or English Literature enthusiasts will love that film because of its settings and features..hehe =p

Warning: Possible spoilers ahead

Watchmen is set in the alternate universe of 1985, where the USA had won the Vietnam war with its band of superheroes and Nixon gets re-elected. (No Reagan..haha) The interesting thing about Watchmen is that it incorporates itself to some extent to the real World History timeline and provided an alternate reality if things had turned out differently in some extent. The very concept of a "Superhero" and "Vigilantism" is heavily examined and scrutinised upon. Watchmen invites its audience to think deeper on the cultural/entertainment concept that has become part and parcel of society today. In Watchmen, the superheroes are incorporated into real living society. They are part of the society fabric, they have jobs, deal with the media attention, law+legislation, they grow old and retire, they struggle with alcoholism and social problems. The members of the Watchmen were not altruistically and straightforward good thinking heroes that we've always thought about. The lines between good and evil are blurred in Watchmen. They have done stuffs on both ends of the ropes. Each of the members of Watchmen embodies a set of extreme ideology and ethics. For instance, Rorschach believes in moral absolutism, Ozymandias holds on to utilitarianism, the Comedian has a nihilistic outlook on life while Dr. Manhattan's detachment from humanity led him down the thinking of determinism. Each of these characters are in some ways representatives of certain sections of society. It's interesting to note though that Ozymandias' name was taken from Percy Shelley's poem and his fortress throne bears a line from that poem too.

There are plenty of rich imagery and metaphors in Watchmen. The recurring images include the Doomsday clock face and the Comedian's smiley badge. I knew about the minutes to midnight symbolism at the doomsday clock coz I've came across it in a History Channel documentary and have done some small research on it a long time ago. It's basically the symbolic clockface used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist to measure how close humanity is closed to nuclear apocalypse. It's a very very real fear especially during the Cold War because one wrong decision by either leaders from the USA or USSR would see major nuclear holocaust. I find the repeated introductory imagery of the bloodstained Smiley face to be quite powerful because it's an ironical juxtaposition of innocence and violence. All throughout the movie, we see characters resounding the Comedian's punch line of "Life's a joke" and "having the last laugh". There is wordplay too in Watchmen - watching the watchmen, watchtowers (Jimi Hendrix's rendition is in there..lol), the watch itself and all them seem to interrelate with each other somehow. In fact, the first batch of heroes that America had was called the Minutemen. Woah..Stan loves all those word plays!..hehe. And then there's also some extent of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and T.S. Elliot's 1920s literature modernist feature inside the Watchmen plus also the disillusionment of the so-called "American Dream". Toward's the end of the movie, I think there's an allusion to Francis Fukuyama's historical thesis "The End of History" following the end of the Cold War (global hippie village..haha). There are lots of satire and Easter eggs in the Watchmen if one were to take the time to analyze the whole movie properly..hehe.

I love the music selection in the Watchmen too! In complying with the 80s scene and world, recognizable songs from that era were selected with what I perceive to be extreme appropriateness. There's Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence", Nena's "99 Luftballons", Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtowers", Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing", Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and MCR's cover for Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row". A nihilistic feeling indeed especially with 99 Luftballons and Desolation Row..haha.

The stuff about Watchmen which I have written here is only a small insight of a mammoth. Lol..I have enough material to go on and on just about the character analysis of Watchmen alone but that'll take forever. The movie's about 2hrs 40 minutes but even with that lengthy amount, I felt that it was not enough to cover the details of the graphic novel. And that 2hrs 40 minutes went off in a captivating blip while I was watching it without me realizing it. Actually when the movie ended with the rockified Desolation Row, there was this urge from me to just give a standing ovation for a brilliant piece of masterpiece..haha. Many of the comics movie adaptation don't live up to the glory of the printed version but this Watchmen movie does do justice to its printed cousin although there were some minor deviations from it. If you're a English Literature/History/Philosophy enthusiast, do watch the movie and read the graphic novel coz it's really worth it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the clock now stands at 5 minutes before midnight...