A look at the dark side of heroes

Watchmen is a classic 1986 comic by the legendary Alan Moore that became a movie in 2009. Just as the original was a reaction against a somewhat sappy optimism inherent to (most) comics of the time, the movie adaptation found itself pitted against the rising MCU in terms of tone and scope.

While most superhero movies are straight-up heroic (hence the name), and some lean a little anti-heroic (Punisher, Blade…), Watchmen poses a world where actions and people don’t fit neatly into good or evil buckets.

We lightly follow Rorschach, a vigilante who’s a mix of Batman’s methods and Punisher’s attitudes (and Dick Tracy’s fashion sense…). Despite being vaguely the main character, he’s a violent psychopath, thinks humanity is beyond saving, and pursues his idea of justice more out of manic compulsion than a desire to help anyone. But his desire to solve the murder of The Comedian drives the plot forward.

If you’d like to avoid…

!!SPOILERS!!

… for a 17-year-old movie based on a 40-year-old comic, now’s the time to bow out.

Watchmen is about nihilism. The world is on the brink of nuclear disaster. The only one who might have the power to save everyone, Dr. Manhattan, seems ill-inclined. He’s not human any longer, the accident having granted him powers that allow him to see so much that mankind’s woes strike him as trivial.

Politicians are failing. Nixon is president and in his fourth term.

Heroes are failing. The old costumed defenders of right and justice are retired, and we see in flashbacks that they weren’t all that righteous to begin with.

Nite Owl and Silk Spectre get involved because they feel useless and bland after their hero years, and for a romantic spark.

Rorschach’s investigation is too little, too late.

Convincing Dr. Manhattan to get involved doesn’t solve anything.

And the main villain, Adrian Veidt (a.k.a. Ozymandias), turns out to be the hero the world needed but never would have asked for. He kills millions of people to unify the world against a common (albeit imagined) threat and end the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

The group we were led by common conception to assume were the plucky, dysfunctional heroes, turn out to have been a bunch of washed-up hacks who nearly ruined it all.

Watchmen is a sendup of the entire superhero genre, putting a pin to the balloon of expectations that if a costumed vigilante were strong enough, moral enough, and steadfast enough, they could solve all the world’s problems. The world’s problems are too bloated and pervasive to fight with that kind of weapon. In the end, even Ozymandias’s grand scheme is hinted to be tenuous in its success.

Because Rorschach did figure it all out in the end, and he mailed off his journal to a newspaper before he went off to the final battle.

Plenty of people watched the movie, likely expecting there to be some kind of happy ending (face it, most wouldn’t have read the comic). What they got instead was an examination of why superheroes, as a concept, don’t work.