The Watchmen is a reminder to the watchmen

I have read a few review about this movie and I watched it with the expectation to see a comic book adaptation like any other comic book adaptation. Wow, was I wrong, It was a serious adaptation but with a strange presentation. As serious as the Dark Knight and 300 but fun nonetheless. I have never read the comic book. I know that it might not be as campy as X-Men or Superman but at least as 300 was good fun,  so it must be in the same vein. After all, the director for both 300 and the Watchmen is the same person.

The Watchmen is a good movie. Make no mistake about that. Only that it is in the vein of Oscar nominated, full of message, very heavy kind of good movie. Not even half as fun as the Dark Knight which was fun although the message was about how far would a good person (e.g. Batman) goes in order to save the city he loves and was trying to protect. The evil in the Dark Knight (e.g. the Joker) seems to be not that much different than Batman in the end. He believes all man are as evil as him and that final moment when the two ferries' passengers were contemplating the death of the other ferry's passengers were the turning point when he realised that was not the case after all. Even a hard core prisoner can have some goodness in him.

What has the Watchmen got to do with a blog about legal happenings? Do you realised the message that the Watchmen was trying to send? What the comic and film is trying to convey has so many relevant to our time. The tag line was 'Who watches the Watchmen?' Let us look in our society. Who is our watchmen? What if these watchmen in the real world did anything wrong? Should they be allowed to do whatever they want or they are capable of as long as they saved the society from any evil? The Watchmen movie slipped in a lot of political comment and explain the word VIGILANTE. Someone who takes the law into their own hands in the belief they know better than any court of law. They are the judge and the executioner.

In Malaysia, there was a few cases where investigations into crime seems to bring the evil in people. There are so many deaths which have been condemned. I may not agree with my fellow bloggers or those who condemned everyone who wears the tag of watchmen whom they claim to be as always be in the wrong but I can't deny that they are in so deep that they sometimes forget that criminals still have their right, before or after being proven guilty. I disagree with those who say to fight evil we need to be as evil as they are. What the Watchmen through Dr. Manhattan try to teach us is that you cannot lose your humanity how much a god you have become. Dr. Manhattan was so godlike he forgots that he need to have check and balance.

All the names, references and in-jokes in the Watchmen were there to remind us of something. I heard Alan Moore is a hard man to please and all of his movie adaptations were condemned by him. Look at League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta. All are good movies but not to him. In the Watchmen, if that is considered as not so good too, I don't know what will please him as the message is clear and the presentation was so vivid like the comic. The only problem is, will the message really reach the people it intended to reach?

Oh, if you still don't get it, in the real world, the watchmen can be those authority figure either the politicians and the police....