At 2 hours and 43 minutes, Zack Snyder's Watchmen delivers way more to talk about than I could even begin to cover here. I could discuss the strange effect of its setting in a past so close to reality it rings true, but so completely different it almost fails to compute. I could talk about its contribution to what is almost a new genre of R-rated slasher/superhero porn. I could pretty much write a novel about its various depictions of the superhero—his place in society, his height, his decline, and who he really is in the end. Even on a purely spiritual level, Watchmen is so full of thoughts to ponder and ideas to discuss, I could probably go off on that subject until I am physically forced to stop speaking.

In a nutshell, Watchmen is the story of a group of 1970s era "superheroes" pulled out of their official police/army/government uniforms and put in masked costumes to fight crime. But when Watchmen begins, what is interesting is that the Watchmen's official careers, as well as those of the predecessors the Minutemen, have ended. Following protests and challenges of "Who Watches the Watcher?", masked crime fighting has been declared illegal. Forced into retirement, the various masked heroes have followed different paths—some down the rabbit hole of insanity, others into the crime they once fought, at least one into an even more fervent pursuit of justice, and a few into the best attempt at normal lives they can find.

But as the remaining Watchmen go about life after their masks, around them looms the doom of the Cold War. The year is 1985, Nixon is still president, and a doomsday clock has been set in anticipation of global destruction at the hands of Russian nuclear weapons. And then the Watchmen come out of retirement to save the day? Actually, not really. For the most part, our remaining superheroes just find themselves caught up in an unfolding plot constantly trying to keep them out of the way.

With The Comedian/Eddie Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) murdered just minutes after the movie begins and an attempt made on the life of Adrian/Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) not long after, the Watchmen pretty much just spend their time trying to figure out what's going on and save themselves. But as you might guess, their own impending doom is also tied to the global doom around them, and although they do not initially set out to return to their positions as the heroes of humanity, they soon find themselves smack dab in the middle of the battle for either its destruction or its salvation. The question is: What exactly is salvation? Is it actually the opposite of destruction? In a world hanging in that balance, could God actually exist? And if so, what would that God like?

Perhaps the most interesting character in Watchmen is Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a nuclear scientist come back to life as an irradiated superhuman. Capable of regeneration, teleportation, and precognition, Dr. Manhattan is repeatedly held up as a kind of god. As Dr. Manhattan walks around nude almost the entire movie, you could argue that he is not just mistakenly trying to step into the same unspoken rule that allows Donald Duck to never wear pants, but accurately stepping into the image of the pre-fall, closest-to-God-man-will-ever-be, human. As a commentator says soon after Dr. Manhattan comes into existence, "God exists, and he is American." And interestingly, as we bear witness to the various actions of Dr. Manhattan's life as well as his response to the current events that surround him, he raises the very questions almost everyone has asked about God at one time or another.

First on the list is the concept of God's perspective versus ours. As Dr. Manhattan repeatedly tells his girlfriend Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), time is simultaneous. But as she counters, "If that's true, then how can you change the future?" As Dr. Manhattan tells her later, "It's too late, always has been, always will be." And only complicating things further, as Dr. Manhattan admits, even if he can change some things, "I can't change human nature." The question being: If we live in a future that God already knows, has the power to change, but only within the limits of the humans living within it, what in the world is His power actually capable of altering anyway?



Next is the problem of when God steps in and when He doesn't (at least as we perceive it). Recruited to reign down destruction in Vietnam, Dr. Manhattan becomes instrumental in winning the Vietnam War for America, but while still there, he also idly stands by as the imbalanced Eddie Blake kills a pregnant woman without a second thought. Cue questions about wars fought in the name or by the claimed power of God. Zoom in on Eddie's response when Dr. Manhattan condemns him for killing a pregnant woman. "You know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into Mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia&ellips; but you didn't lift a finger!"

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