Watchmen

Just watched Watchmen. While the movie's still fresh in my head, I thought I'd write something about it. Throughout the whole movie, I felt like I wasn't watching a serious superhero movie, more like a parody movie, but one that took itself seriously. The movie was also dark, but not in the same way as the Dark Knight, which more or less held onto a coherent theme/moral value from beginning to end. The moral ambiguities posed in watchmen even baffled a god like being to the point where he ended up leaving the planet. (I watched the director's cut, which has about 15 minutes more violence and nudity in it, so for those of you who watched it in theaters, you might have a different opinion.) To me, the movie poses more questions than answers, and in its attempt to reveal human nature through twists and turns in the plot, it took the superhero world that's full of ideals and turned it upside down. Good guys seemed bad at times, and bad guys ended up being not so bad. Ultimately, the film is not about superheros but about humans and human nature, with the message being that humans whether they're criminals or heroes aren't good or bad; we simply act on our human nature. The film doesn't really say how superheroes became superheroes or why they have slightly more extraordinary abilities than normal people, they just are and the audience is expected to accept that. Instead the movie focuses on their personal lives, moral conflicts and how they react to the events around them, which ultimately made them seem like normal people only wearing costumes. Actually, let me revise my opinion. There was one true superhero in the movie: Rorschach, who was the only one in the film with an immovable ideal for justice, and who despite his death in the end, ultimately got what he really wanted, but the question is at what cost? In a way you could say justice was served with the truth being reveled, but that would entail humans once again turning against each other in a series of events that could lead to Armageddon... What's right? What's wrong? What's good? What's evil? In the end it's all just human nature... On the other hand, as I contradict everything I just stated, the film does espouse a value for human life, and does believe that life is more than just an insignificant earthly phenomenon. Through the godly being, Jon, the audience sees the world and it events from a more distant perspective and we see that humans, life and the earth is insignificant but valuable. As I trail off into the longtail of oblivion, my final evaluation of the film is: interesting, unpredictable, not as I expected, innovative and obviously very thought provoking.