Movie Review: Watchmen

“This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool”
~William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

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I finally got to watch Watchmen last night after such a long time. I know, I’m so two-thousand-late. But I’ve been a fan of streaming movies online lately. Watch-movies-links.net and Tv-links.cc are two of my favourite links. I practically live in their dominion. When your a university student drowning in a sea of debt, having the liberty to watch movies online is a blessing.

Anyway, as I was saying, I found Watchmen to be really good. In fact, I can’t wait to read the novel. I would do it soon but I’m taking three English courses and two Political Science courses this sem.’Tis going to be a very brutal four months. I just saw two of my course syllabus today and boy, I wanted to cry.

When I saw the movie last night, it had a strange effect on me. It was as I was reading George Orwell’s 1984 again.  Every constitution, government, country are all flawed.  The superheroes themselves were flawed. They were not perfect. And through them, we can see how in the battle between war and peace, right and wrong becomes easily interchangeable.

One of the characters who I found very interesting was The Comedian. Although he was murdered in the beginning of the narrative, his prescence nevertheless remains till the end. By twenty-first century definition, a comedian is “a professional entertainer who makes his audience laugh by telling jokes, acting foolishly” (OED).  A Chris Rock-figure if you might say. However, in the world of weird and mind-boggling English Majors such as myself, comedians in narratives such as Watchmen, take root from the master playwright himself: William Shakespeare. 

In his comedies, Shakespeare use jesters, fools or clowns to incorporate paradox in his plays. While everyone is running around like a madman, the jesters in the play become the ultimate source of reason for the audience. They see things which other characters in the play can’t. Feste from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my favourite. In one of the scenes he said, “better a witty fool than a foolish wit” and Watchmen’s The Comedian was no “foolish wit”.

From the beginning, the Comedian was the one who actually made sense. His character was rugged and held no remorse, but his dialogues are so powerful because we know there is a truth behind in what he is saying. We are all living in a society where the value of truth has been turned into ashes. We have no sense of what is right and what is wrong anymore. Sure, we have religion. But everyone has a religion they put faith in. One could say that the invention of the nuclear bomb in World War II holds the same social impact that the French revolution once held. The once mighty guillotine has now been transformed into a bomb that not only can severe the head of one, but billions of people. Human nature is flawed because of our inability to shut out corruption. Sad, but true isn’t it?

Edward Blake (The Comedian): God damn I love working on American soil, Dan. Ain’t had this much fun since Woodward and Bernstein. Congress is pushing through some new bill that’s gonna outlaw masks. Our days are numbered. Till then it’s like you always say, we’re society’s only protection.

Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl II): From what?

Edward Blake (The Comedian): You kidding me? From themselves. 

I’ll be taking an English course on graphic novels next semester and I hope, this will be one of the materials we’re going to tackle. Post-modern novels really intrigue me. I haven’t read Watchmen yet, but Alan Moore is already becoming one of my favourite writers alongside Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and George Orwell (1984). If you haven’t seen or read Watchmen, go see or read it. It’s a good break from all those nonsensical movies that hollywood just tend to throw at people for the sake of box office profit. 

I give this movie FIVE mini-Darth Vaders out of FIVE:

That is all.

Adieu.