Watchmen

I'm cheating as I have not read Alan Moore’s novel.
Yet, maybe that is why I see the film in a different way to those who have read the book.

I rate Watchmen as one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time and I was greatly disappointed to find that the review I read seemed to miss the relevance of the film and the fundamental questions it raised.

It’s not really a film about super heroes at all - except perhaps in that anyone who tries to make a difference is a hero of some sort. Yeah, the super powers are fun and allow some good SFX.
There’s a bit of sex and a fair bit of violence perhaps to expand the film’s appeal to modern audiences.

The film sets the scene with a countdown to doomsday. The inevitable mutual annihilation of Russia and America with nuclear weapons. I reckon the countdown continues it’s just a different doom!

Yet, to me Watchmen is really about the attempts of society to make its citizens powerless, and, like the Dark Knight, it is about the bad and the mad running the show.
It forces you again and again to look at the question “Do the ends justify the means?”

Maybe the film should have had Dr Manhattan created alongside the first atom bomb and then perhaps it would have been more obvious that he was the incarnation of the spirit of science.
Slowly becoming less and less human, less and less interested in the benefits nuclear power might have for mankind and more and more disillusioned with the way the monkey men and the money men saw everything only in terms of how it could benefit them.

In this reality America wins the Vietnam war because it has no scruples and convinces Dr Manhattan to use his powers.
However, the result of this, perhaps like Oppenheimer, is the realisation, that if science can make it then fools will abuse it and the devastation and death are just as much due to the creators as the users!

In a more modern version it might have been interesting to see the unjolly blue giant shock and awe Iraq to the same effect. Dr Manhattan’s farther was a watchmaker and passed on his skill to his son. So, despite a mind that seems happy to work in a quantum universe DR M still has an affinity with Newton’s clockwork universe and the predictability such a paradigm bestows.

Would the world benefit from a benevolent dictator and would anyone fit for the job want it?
These questions are never explicitly asked but I feel they were pointed to.
What makes a good man? What makes a moral man? What makes hero?
These questions are asked but I’m not sure if they are answered!

A film which will always be ahead of its time :O)