I went and saw Watchmen the night before last. It was OK. I will give them credit for this much up front: it did not feel like a near-three-hour movie. It was not physically painful in the way, say, Titanic was. So, kudos on that, at least.
And I won’t get more into the Antigone/Marcotte topics, other than to give my two cents here rather then have my shining wisdom buried in long threads, which I have not read to their completion so if I ignore something you commented on, you know, forgive me.
And I will spoil the living fuck out of this thing, because my main gripe is with the ending. For your convenience, after my list of non-spoiling complaints, I provide a cut.
1) Dear Zack Snyder: Could you put more schlong in your movies? There’s really no such thing as too gratuitous.
I don’t know how to feel about the films of Snyder’s that I have seen. On the one hand, it’s nice to see male bodies treated like we’re used to seeing female bodies treated. I saw Watchmen with two guys, one who had seen 300 and one who hadn’t, and the one who had said “Well, you kind of feel bad about yourself after watching all those perfect-looking men run around basically naked the whole movie.” “Welcome to the world of women,” I said. Because it’s true. And I generally like his sex scenes, because he directs some of the only sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie theatre that even come close to looking like people actually having sex. Good sex, not romantic comedy sex, but actual sex where both parties get to enjoy themselves. Sure, the people having sex are generally far more attractive than people are in real life, but I’m ok with that because if I ever want to see normal people having sex, well, I have the internet. For movie ticket prices, give me sexy. But not too sexy, because I have to believe it, ya’ know.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s ok for sexy things to hit the cutting room floor. Watching a Zack Snyder movies always leaves me with a creepy feeling that I know too much about Zack Snyder’s fantasy life. And Dr Manhattan’s giant blue god-dick was creepy in its inert ginormousness, like a stuffed blue gym sock taped to his nether regions. I mean, if you’re going to put cock out there where everyone can see it, make it move a little so it doesn’t seem like it’s just kind of floating in the air in front of Dr Manhattan, untroubled and unconnected to the motion of his body.
2) A little updating might not have killed the story line. When the movie first ended, I was quite critical, until my roommate, who had read the comic, explained to me that it was written in 1985, and exactly how closely they had kept to the source material. Knowing that made it a little better. But what seemed gut-wrenchingly scary to people in 1985 (namely, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction and the fact that there was now enough firepower on the planet to vaporize everyone and everything multiple times) is background noise to people my age and younger, and I am way closer to 30 than I’d like to admit. For us, it’s always been that way, and so the sense of urgency and fright the beginning of the movie was trying to convey seems almost as quaint as those 1950′s videos of children being trained to hide under their desks in the event of nuclear explosion. Oh! For those innocent times when only two superpowers had access to nukes, which were large and obvious and prohibitively expensive! Before the internet, there were no instructions to make your own nuclear bomb on the internet.
I’m old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, and while I knew it was a big deal, I remember not being quite clear as to why. The fear of the Soviets and the complexities of the cold war did not make it down to elementary school children in a clear and convincing matter, which is probably part of the reason people who would never joke about the Nazis find Soviet kitsch to be hilarious. By the time we were old enough to understand, it was over, and it was recent enough in history to always be cut short by the end of the year – it was never treated with the same depth or repetition as say, the Civil War or WWII.
The result was I found a lot of that movie to be hokey until I really sat and thought about it. And I’m a thinking, reading person who loves Russian novels and has read quite a bit about Soviet history in the last year or two. Hell, I just returned a library book about fucking chess’ role in the Cold War, OK? I’m saying, I’ve done my independent study on this topic. If the point was lost on me until I had some context for when and why the story was written, imagine how little of it is getting to your average 18-35 year old movie goer? Yeah, that’s right. Your point just got lost in well-choreographed gore and gratuitous blue wang.
3) Could you have made Silk Spectre II look less like Xena? The whole time she was kicking ass I kept on thinking of that Simpson’s episode: “I didn’t know Xena could fly!” “I keep telling you, I’m Lucy Lawless!” She can keep the cute little wiggle dresses though. Those were awesome.
And finally, spoiler, and probably the only place Antigone might agree with me.
4) Could we please update any ending that has one man saving the whole motherfucking world because he was inspired by his love for one woman? This isn’t specific to Watchmen, it made my teeth grind in the Matrix movies as well, and many others. Fuck Silk Spectre’s crappy latex-n-garter getup, how about where her major superhero contribution is being younger than Janie at the right time for Dr Manhattan – who is supposed to be a demi-god with insight into reality that no human could ever posess, right? This is what justified his being a cold, selfish motherfucker, right? – anyway, at the right time for Dr Manhatten to goggle over the fact that of all the sperm and eggs in the history of sperm and egg combinations, just the right combination happened for all of history to produce her. You know, her and every other person on the face of the fucking planet. Then, she was smart enough to distract him with her terrible paternity realization before he could get to the obvious next stage in that thought – if she wasn’t her, she’d be someone else, and he’d probably have left his wife anyway because Janie was, after all, aging. Hell, he’d probably have eventually left Silk Xena for a younger woman if he hadn’t been forced to leave her for another galaxy. It makes as much sense to marvel at the people you know being the people you know as it does to anguish over every last sperm+egg combo that didn’t happen because maybe those people were even awesomer than the ones you know now.
They did this in the Matrix, too, explaining that Neo was an extra-special One because his love for Trinity was different from the generalized, Jesus-like love his predecessors had for all of humanity. This does not resonate with me because I would think a generalized, Jesus-like sacrificing love for all of humankind is probably a little harder to achieve than warm feelings for a sexy lady who likes you back. After all, I’ve been able to achieve Twu Luv several times in my life, but I’ll never be a saint. Which brings me to my next point, Twu Luv can evaporate in a flash, and I’d like my saviors to base my salvation in something a little bit more reliable, or at least less cliche and hackneyed. It makes me think, well then what if Trinity/Xena/whomever hadn’t been there to be all inspiring? The rest of us would be fucked, that’s what. Ok, in Watchmen lots of people were fucked anyway, but not because Dr Manhattan was a petulant bastard (Silk Xena saved us from that possibility, using her special Vagina Powers!)
So if I have a feminist bitch with Watchmen, it’s that the general all-around good girl power show that Silk Xena gave was reduced to nothing when you discover that in the end, her real power was pussy power the whole time. Pussy power exerted on a clueless, boring douche. As usual. Big fucking deal.
Itty-bitty nitpick: I did say the movie was technically good. You’re right; it didn’t feel like 3 hours.
Hmm. I thought it was less about his love for one woman and more about his fascination with the complexity of genetics, and the specifity of what came about when life did its… thing.
…Unless I’m really missing something, Manhattan never saved the world anyway; he just agreed to not rat out Ozy. So even if Laurie’s pussy is extremely relevant to him it’s not a ‘superpower’, surely?
I also tend to see the fact that they had a long relationship that she walked out on as demonstrating that he hadn’t just left Janey (not his wife, btw) because Laurie was younger than her, but it was genuinely a different sort of relationship. Not that this makes the ‘pussy power’ situation much better. :/
You know, her and every other person on the face of the fucking planet.
That’s exactly what I read him as meaning…maybe it comes over that way in the comic but not in the film? I’ll bear that in mind if I go see it again, which I probably will.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I gotta say, the Laurie-and-Dr. Manhattan scene in the comic book humanized Dr. Manhattan–who, to that point, seemed like a one-dimensional, heartless, self-serving prick. Maybe I’m not reading enough into it — and like I said, I haven’t seen the movie, so it may not translate well into live action– but I actually found that scene in the book sorta romantic. The comic definitely seems to want the reader to hate Dr. Manhattan for leaving Janey, btw–even when I read it as a kid, I couldn’t stand him–and that scene makes him seem, just for a second, like a real person.
Maybe there will come a day when negative critiques of the content of the Watchmen movie will not be about things that were faithful to the books.
Today is not that day.
I have not seen the movie, but I read the book. The impression I got was that Manhattan and Janey broke up not because she was aging, but because she couldn’t accept that he wasn’t. Which is, admittedly, a hell of a fine line. However, it was probably inevitable anyway – by the time it was over Dr. Manhattan was in a very literal sense not the man she fell in love with. Coming back from the dead can put a serious strain on any relationship.
Also, Dr. Manhattan never had a generalized savior-like love for humanity – he made a point that he loved Laurie personally, and that she was the only human being he cared for.
Not sure what to think about the whole ‘miracle’ speech. Someone on Pandagon suggested the point was actually about her parents: that Blake was a deeply, irredemmably flamed person, but Sally still found something worthwhile in him – and it was this individual love which inspired Manhattan, briefly, to a love for humanity in general.
And Dr Manhattan’s giant blue god-dick was creepy in its inert ginormousness, like a stuffed blue gym sock taped to his nether regions.
Of course, Manhatten’s entire body was put together by willpower – the giant blue organ may well have been male vanity coimng through in the process.
And Manhatten didn’t really seem to love Janey – IMHO, he was just going through the motions because it’s what he thought the man he used to be would do. He didn’t connect with her; he didn’t care when she left.
Coming back from the dead can put a serious strain on any relationship.
Oh, yeah? Where’s your proof for that, huh, huh?
I’m with you on the last point. At least in the Matrix, the woman in question had a personality to recommend that sort of love. But Silk’s main attraction seemed to be her Hawt Ass. It wasn’t the script, though. The actress couldn’t act.
I don’t know. Considering the script reduced Silk Spectre II to little more than a cardboard cutout of the character whose only real function in the movie was to be a conduit toward convincing Dr. Manhattan to return to Earth? I thought she was just fine for the part.
But then, I thought the character came off kind of shallow in the books. At least from what I remember.
In the comic, that’s explicit. She tells Dr. Manhattan, baffled, “But that’s true of anyone in the world,” and he says yes, that’s true of everyone in the world; that’s why he wants to save them. It’s an improbable miracle happening a billion times over. So he’s not really saving it for her; her life is the catalyst.
I always interpreted that scene in the comic as a side effect of Dr. Manhattan’s deterministic method of viewing time. To him, everything that had happened and is happening and will happen are all happening right now. So he doesn’t really care about anything because it’s already happened and he can’t change it.
Then Janie tells him about her parents, and the incredibly immense improbability of someone starting a relationship with someone who tried to rape her combined with the already incredibly immense improbability that any particular sperm and egg would combine proves that it’s not all deterministic, that randomness takes place in the world and therefore he can change things. And so he goes off to save the world/not tell on Ozymandias.