What Watchmen Means To Me

Rating: 10/10 (7 March 2009)

I first read Watchmen my senior year of college. I hadn't really read comics at any earlier point in my life, and it was one of the first dozen books I bought when I got into them. Warner Brothers took a chance on this film that took so long to happen and I applaud them and Zack Snyder for their efforts, but by the pure nature of the medium an audience member simply doesn't get as much information about the characters as they would if they sat down and read the book, and in a one-of-a-kind superhero story like this, character development is everything.
It seems that the film has generated a love-it-or-hate-it reaction all over the internet. Whenever I read a review by someone that didn't like Watchmen, their complaints are generally about events and characters they didn't understand, mainly Dr. Manhattan.
Most films about superheroes these days have some kind of plot device to explain to the audience exactly what these people can do, i.e. Lois Lane listing off each and every one of Superman's powers. Therefore, when an omnipotent being like Dr. Manhattan is shown hovering clothes in the air one minute and teleporting to Mars the next, the unsuspecting viewer can react unpleasantly because it is not a concept they've been trained to understand. They argue that it isn't believable that a character would do that. As it turns out, people like that don't often become storytellers.
Dr. Manhattan's limitless power completely separates him from everyone else on Earth, and feeling no connection to it, he initially has no incentive to stop the planet's self-destruction. After eventually learning about love and humanity over decades of destruction, he decides to intervene but finds that he was too late. Ultimately he decides to travel to another galaxy and create life on his own. But where does he go and what happens next? What happens to Earth? What becomes of Manhattan's world? Could it be our own? It's possible, seeing as how the Earth depicted in Watchmen is clearly not the one we live in. So if you're desperately trying to find a way to relate to this movie and would like an easy frame of reference, just keep this in mind: Watchmen is an origin story for God.