I saw the “Watchmen” movie last night. When asked if it was good, my response was “I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it good, but it was interesting.” Here I present some amplifications on this theme. I should mention that I never read the comic book on which it’s based.
Are They Serious?
There’s a lot of material in Watchmen that might, or might not, be parody. I’m really not sure how it’s intended. Some examples:
- Silk Spectre (II)’s costume, fetishization of: The camerawork spends a non-trivial amount of time playing up the fetishistic elements of the Silk Spectre’s costumes. Fanservice or parody?
- Dr. Manhattan’s penis: Come on!
- Rorschach’s voice-over: This sounds like a parody of 40’s noir narration. Is it intended to be taken seriously, or to represent the inner dialog of a nut who’s modeling himself after film-noir heroes, or to mock writers who try to emulate 40’s tough-guy dialog?
- The flamethrower: The “Archie” flamethrower is triggered during the Silk Spectre/Nite Owl sex scene. Intended as an actual metaphor, or a mockery of every train-entering-the-tunnel sequence ever filmed?
- The war room: Nixon and his generals are gathered in a war room that looks like a direct lift from “Dr. Strangelove.” Is this a ripoff, a joke, or an artifact of common source material?
- Ride of the Valkyries: Dr. Manhattan attacks the Viet Cong to music from “Apocalypse Now”. I’m not sure what this means.
- Brutality, miscellaneous: Watchmen has got some really over-the-top, unpleasant material in it. Is this the natural result of recent movie trends? (E.g. that recently cause Roger Ebert to write: “So now my job as a film critic involved grading rape scenes. I don’t think I can.”) Or is this brutality making fun of this trend?
Musings
In addition to the central question discussed above, namely “is this a drama or a comedy”, I had a few other thoughts on the movie:
- Wouldn’t you like to see a scene in which Dr. Manhattan meets Dr. Strangelove?
- The Comedian is not very funny
- Three hours is a long time
- The denouement of the Laurie Juspeczyk/Dr. Manhattan sex scene is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in quite a while
- How, exactly, does Rorschach’s mask work?
- Someone involved in this project really liked skeletons
- Watchmen uses music in a very unusual way; the selections seem to be heavily weighted towards the 60’s (odd for a movie released in 2009, set in 1985, about characters with their origins in the 1940s) and the songs seem to be unusually prominent (in both length and volume) on the soundtrack
