The blue guy had too much beer.
Watchmen (2009) is a fusion of the superhero and film noir genres, an exploration of the limits of good and evil, how the actions of costumed vigilantes, who see themselves as judge, jury, and executioner, differ so little from those they pursue – whether it be merely the gang member in front of them, or the two greatest countries in the world in a tireless rivalry which, in their stubborn perversity, may explode into Armageddon at any moment.
There’s a big cast of characters here, ranging from President Nixon (in his third term? fifth term?), through the superheros who make up the vigilantes, onwards to the enigmatic Dr. Manhattan, a physicist killed and recreated as a near-god in a physics accident, but my attention was drawn to two of the vigilantes.
Rorschach, whose mask flashes through the cards of the same name, is a cipher and the personification of vigilantism, tracking down criminals and executing them. His allegiance to all that is good may be uncompromising, to use his word, but his methods are evidence of an underlying psychoticism exacerbated by the ceaseless cries of civil rights by those very criminals who have violated the rights of their victims. His thirst to cleanse the world of all that is evil makes him, paradoxically, an ambiguous character, but whose unceasing pursuit of evil – at least as he sees it – drives the story.
So when Rorschach discovers that another superhero, The Comedian, has been killed, he follows up on it. The Comedian is the other character who fascinated me. A vigilante who glories in the violence, he is less a man interested in justice than in satiating his primitive desires, and in that satiation he glimpses the fragile underpinnings of the artificial systems of justice we inevitably live in. Such a glance at the insanity of losing these systems would cause many to lose their minds, but for The Comedian, it makes him laugh, even if his laughter is maniacal and his mood black as tar. For all that the movie begins with his murder, he casts a long shadow over the entire enterprise, because, for all his chaotic and unrestrained desires, he emits some light as well. He is the hidden father of one of the new generation of vigilantes. His sigil will acquire planet-wide significance. And he is the one who discovers the fantastic scheme to force peace on this world, which in turn forces him to realize he has no friends as he turns 60 years old, no one to share this adventure with, an adventure which ends all too soon.
But this scheme, much like the vicious methods use to attain justice in individual encounters, requires equally vicious methods, but scaled up to the deaths of millions, sacrificed on the altar of peace and survival. Will it happen? Rorschach may violently disapprove of the scheme – but its originator believe it’s the only way to save human civilization. And what of Dr. Manhattan’s observation that the Universe is like a giant clock, predictable and relentless – do we have free will or no? Does it mean there is justice – or just someone’s clock?
This is a long and almost luxuriant movie, with characters mostly drawn out with delicacy, but it’s also gratuitously violent, and, at least in the director’s cut that I saw, has a cartoon interspersed throughout, a morbid tale of a man, concerned about the fate of his family after his ship is ravaged by The Black Freighter, attempting to return to his home port, and what occurs when he finally arrives. It appears to be connected to Rorschach, but I’m entirely unsure as to its purpose in the movie.
This movie is magnificently parsimonious in its information, and it asks a lot of implicit questions.
Recommended.
