Reviews of Watchmen (1986) and related work
- Adaptation: Watchmen (2009)
- Bonus material: “Tales of the Black Freighter” (2009)
- Bonus material: “Under the Hood” (2009)
- Sequel: Watchmen (2019)
Watchmen (1986
)
Dave Gibbons (artist), John Higgins (colourist), Alan Moore (writer).
Around the time that superhero comics began to appear in reality, some gangs were using masks to prevent identification. In response, a couple of young New York cops meted out vigilante “justice” with masks of their own. One of them created a masked alter ego, and this was imitated, starting a minor media craze. Not being terribly normal or stable people to begin with, a lot of those costumed heroes of the 1940s, and their handful of villains, ended up dead or put away.
Another generation of American “superheroes” was spawned when a scientist accidentally obtained actual superhuman power through the loss of his “intrinsic field” in a 1950s experiment. That man, dubbed “Doctor Manhattan” to allude to the Manhattan Project and scare the commies, increased human insight into physics to a point where things like anti-gravity flight, miniaturized computing, smart fabrics and genetically engineered exotic pets were all possible three decades later. Manhattan, working for the US government, also won the war in Vietnam, enabling Richard Nixon to repeal the Twenty-second Amendment and stay on as president. Another 1960s superhero, the Comedian, also worked for the government, so John F. Kennedy, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were mysteriously killed. “Marxist” regimes in South America never last.
With servants such as Manhattan and the Comedian, the arteries of the US government have been hardening for decades. Both men are briefly part of a crime-fighting team called the Watchmen, but they aren’t effective against the root causes of crime, and they dissolve when the Comedian points out they can’t prevent the bigger threat of war either. In 1977, a police strike leads to the outlawing of superheroes, restoring the rule of law. However, Doctor Manhattan’s continued existence heightens the risk for war because he is capable of stopping a high percentage of Soviet warheads. Stockpiles have been growing to counteract that.
In 1985, it becomes uncertain whether the sole superhuman would want to try to save humankind. Immortal and capable of viewing time and matter more accurately than humans, he teleports and colocates freely. Gradually internalizing the fact that he now shares almost nothing with his species, he is losing his sense of community and respect for the “overrated phenomenon” of life. He is still devastated to hear that many of his old acquaintances are dead or dying of a cancer his mere presence may have caused. In that same year, a hated madman who refused to retire from killing criminals investigates the murder of the Comedian on the brink of nuclear war.
The question “Who watches the watchmen?” was imagined by the poet Juvenal, or placed in one of his satires after his death. It has become associated with the political problems that Plato grappled with in the much earlier Republic (ca. 375 BCE). If you build a state where power is concentrated, how can you then protect the powerful from corruption? In other words, if disincentives like the violence of Batman (1940) are to form the basis of society, how can they be enforced? Plato’s answer was that our protectors at the top will live by the “noble lie” that they are better than those below, and therefore responsible. Moore knew better. His Doctor Manhattan, like the similar hero of “A Scientist Rises” (1932), also knows better.
You can enjoy Watchmen as an isolate work in the superhero action genre, on the strength of its character writing and crisp visuals. Whether you’re a fan of the genre or not, you can enjoy its interrogation of the superhero motif. It’s a thoughtful and entertaining examination of power from inside a culturally significant genre that is usually nonchalant with power. On a higher level still, Watchmen is structurally brilliant, a marvel of composition in plotting and visuals.
References here: The Incredibles (2004), Megamind (2010), Mars Express (2023).
‣ Watchmen (2009
)
Whereas in the comic there are two entities with definite superhuman powers, in the film there is only one. Instead of faking an extraterrestrial arrival, Veidt fakes an attack by Dr. Manhattan on major cities, killing approximately 15 million.
Good casting, except of Veidt. Too much ass-kicking with greater strength and endurance all around. Too much famous pop and Wagner on the soundtrack. The use of Glass, on the other hand, is appropriate.
The ending is significantly less appealing and logical than that of the comic, and there are many minor irritations among the details. Images are exported from the comic for no real reason, such as the graveyard statue. Some of the makeup is poor, including Nixon. On the whole I was surprised at the quality with which Snyder filmed what was designed to be unfilmable, but it could have used a little Glauber Rocha.
References here: Tiger & Bunny (2011).
fiction moving picture adaptation
‣‣ “Tales of the Black Freighter” (2009)
“More – blood! More – blood!”
Hypodiegesis.
animation fiction moving picture bonus material
‣‣ “Under the Hood” (2009)
Like the Dawn of the Dead (2004) newscast material: clearly inferior in style to the movie, and feeling partly cobbled together. There’s a fictional, very poor commercial, and random real ones. The appearance of incidental characters from the main story is also unfortunate.
fiction moving picture bonus material
‣ Watchmen (2019)
Seen in 2026.
A “raging narcissist whose ambition knows no limits” has a secret plan.
Damon Lindelof achieves here what he did not in Lost (2004). HBO wanted and expected him to make multiple seasons of this Watchmen series, but instead, he paid tribute both to the compositional tightness of the original and to Alan Moore’s anti-authoritarian agenda. Lindelof even uses Moore’s version of the ending, not Zack Snyder’s. I appreciate that, but Glauber Rocha is still too far away.
In the interest of his political agenda, Lindelof softens up the science fiction further, gives the mature Doctor Manhattan an uncharacteristic interest in life and love, and retcons the identity of Hooded Justice, the original masked hero of the setting. Lindelof’s Hooded Justice is not Rolf Müller but a police officer who watched a silent fiction film about Bass Reeves on the day of the 1921 Tulsa pogrom. This man was inspired by Samuel J. Battle, and he’s bisexual. His skin is dark, but he paints the part that shows under his costume. He thereby represents the distortion of historiography in white- and heteronormative WW2-era USA, with a romance of violent vengeance for the excluded and oppressed.
One of the acts of white-supremacist violence that drives this Hooded Justice to put on a mask is when a solitary, physically unfit KKK man in civilian clothing casually sets fire to a Jewish-owned delicatessen and slowly walks away, knowing that he is observed and expecting no consequences. Despite fighting such a caricature, Lindelof’s Hooded Justice is wise enough to see the negative effects of his vigilantism, and gives it up. By an implausible coincidence, he obtains a genuine superpower, in the form of a hypnotic light invented by KKK mesmerists. This is all more wishful and less elegant than Moore’s vision, where there is more continuity between the costumed vigilantes of the KKK, the police, and the crime-fighting supers that followed.
Lindelof wears this inelegance on his sleeve. Before Hooded Justice puts on the hood in this version, the story of Superman is told to him, as it was told in Action Comics in 1938, so that fictional superheroes from the real world are established before Hooded Justice. That’s dumb. We don’t see the pirate comics of the graphic novel emerging in response to superheroes “becoming real”.
Compounding this loss of internal cohesion and dynamism, even the presentation is self-conscious beyond formalism. In telling the story of Hooded Justice in episode 6, this series uses mostly black and white, but there’s one red object as in Schindler’s List (1993). The episode before that, episode 5, is the midpoint of the series, and its peak. In it, the writers examine the consequences of Veidt’s gambit with plausible psychology under capitalism, using a character who is somewhat like Rorschach but who is also the most original thing in the show. Along the way, the writers establish that Schindler’s List does not exist in this fork of the setting, because Steven Spielberg made a movie about Veidt’s fake squid attack instead, and used the same visual trick of a single red object in that alternative movie.
Laurie Blake, née Juspeczyk, has become an implausibly reckless FBI agent specializing in superheroes. She’s a silly character, but she says of the added whimsicality and presentism on this show that “I’m tired of all the silliness.” So am I. There would have been ample opportunity for social consciousness in a more serious tribute.