This film is adapted from a comic of the same name published in 1986-1987, but it is not an orthodox heroic story for young readers. First of all, there is no villain in the story who did evil to satisfy his own desires. The last villain Adrian Veidt killed tens of millions of people, but his purpose was to save mankind, and he succeeded in becoming A beloved hero. The first protagonist of the story, Rorschach, has always adhered to principles, hated evil, and even sacrificed his life to become a benevolence, but if his efforts are successful, humanity will be destroyed in his own hands. This constitutes a huge irony: because human nature is dirty after all, there is unresolved malice and mistrust between people, so human beings either live in dirty lies, or live in clean truth. Die.
The six masked heroes appearing in the story are called Watchmen. Among them, only Doctor Manhattan has superpowers. He is the basis of the overhead historical background of this story. In addition to retaining his personality and emotional weakness as a human, Dr. Manhattan is almost all-knowing and omnipotent. Because of his appearance, the United States easily won the Vietnam War, and the Cold War balance between the United States and the Soviet Union was broken. Because Dr. Manhattan could wipe out the Soviet power by himself, the Soviet Union could only panic stockpile a huge amount of nuclear warheads, threatening to seek its own safety with the threat of all. As Adrian Witt analyzed: Even if Dr. Manhattan can intercept 99% of Soviet nuclear warheads, the remaining 1% can still destroy all living creatures on the planet.
Therefore, not only did Dr. Manhattan fail to bring more security to Americans, on the contrary, the United States and even the entire human society in the story are caught in a doomsday crisis that is more oppressive and terrifying than the Cold War crisis in real history. Among the six heroes, Adrian Witt, the only one who has disclosed his true identity except Dr. Manhattan, the genius known as the "smartest man in the world", uses his own computing model to predict that if he does not intervene in the situation, humans will It is difficult to avoid the fate of destruction. However, his salvation plan can be regarded as the greatest irony of human civilization and humanity: he deceived and used Dr. Manhattan (the difficulty lies in overcoming Dr. Manhattan’s ability to predict the future), destroying the most prosperous cities and 1,500. The lives of ten thousand people successfully forced the two countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, which could end human civilization at any time but at the same time lived in fear of each other, to end their confrontation, turn their enemies into friends, and jointly confront the "enemy of man" Dr. Manhattan. At the same time, he also used the help of Dr. Manhattan to permanently solve the earth's energy crisis and clean up the capital oligarchs that control the existing energy in the world, so that mankind will not be caught in disputes in the future. With his superb resourcefulness and execution ability, he made himself an idol for the whole people, while calmly saving mankind. When Dr. Manhattan discovered his purpose, his plan was irreversible. After weighing the pros and cons, as he predicted, Dr. Manhattan cooperated with his plan, willingly stigmatized to promote the peace of mankind. Adrian Witt may be the villain in this story, but in this story full of irony, mankind is saved by his conspiracy.
Dr. Manhattan is called "fortunately God is an American" by the President of the United States. Although he has been helping the White House and Adrian Witt’s cause, he may not be the same as Adrian Witt, believing that these efforts are beneficial to mankind. The real meaning. Because he has seen and experienced too many things that humans cannot see and experience, his immortality and ability to perceive human hearts and predict the future have all made him a nihilistic god. He was originally a first-class physicist with a deep and rational understanding of the material world. He was only confused about the human spirit (human nature). After he became "Superman", this confusion made him at a loss, because he has surpassed the life form we know and reached a field that no one has ever set foot in-he can no longer look at it like an ordinary human. Life and death survived, and at the same time gradually lost human instincts such as joy, anger, sorrow, and fear. The feelings he has for humans are more like memories of the feelings he had when he was a human, and this influence is gradually disappearing, because he even starts to get tired of the humanity in himself. In the face of the vast will of the universe, life is only a fleeting phenomenon, and the fate of mankind is not worth mentioning. To quote his girlfriend Laurie's evaluation of him:
The way he sees things now is as if he has forgotten their true colors, this real world, to him, is like walking through the fog, and people are just a pile of shadows.
At the end of the story, when Laurie decided to break up with him, he no longer cared about humans. As he said, Laurie is the last bond between him and mankind, and this bond has been lost, next he will go to a distant galaxy to try to create life. If our world also has an all-knowing and omnipotent Creator who does not see and never intervenes in our suffering, then his situation may be similar to that of Dr. Manhattan—he understands that the correct way to love us is to ignore us and treat us. The salvation is to let us fend for ourselves.
Contrary to Dr. Manhattan, Adrian Witt is an extremist with clear goals and active actions. He is a tyrant who lacks moral consciousness. In order to save the lives of most people, he can sacrifice a few without hesitation. Contrary to Rorschach, he only thinks about "good" rather than "right" things. He regarded Dan and Rorschach’s actions to uphold justice and eliminate violence as a trifling matter. Although he was one of them, the appearance of Dr. Manhattan changed everything: in the shadow of the end of mankind, all justice and evil, Crime and punishment have lost their meaning. If all human beings perish, who cares about which corpse was an upright person and which corpse was a cunning person? He is even an idealistic person. His salvation plan not only contributed to the U.S.-Soviet alliance, he also eliminated the world’s energy oligarchs and trust organizations through assassinations, and at the same time, with the help of Dr. Manhattan’s superpowers to develop almost infinite low-cost New energy has thus prevented mankind from launching wars due to the energy crisis. Because of this, he claimed that Alexander the Great was his only blood relative, because they shared a common ideal: to establish a world federation. However, he didn't realize from the beginning that a chivalrous man could not save the world, but was inspired by The Comedian.
Comedians are the masters of irony. He has no conscience and morality, and he has not been bothered by the question of "what is justice". He doesn't care about anything, likes destruction and bloodthirsty, he joins the watchman only because he can do something with people. (In the original book, he even assassinated a member of the Watchmen of the previous generation.) He was the first to see through the absurd nature of the world and the true face of humanity, but he did not become world-weary (Dr. Manhattan) or out of anger ( Rorschach), but chose to parody human nature without embellishment: he indulges his savage and willfulness, does whatever he wants and is selfish. When he casually used violence against street sports, he declared that he was protecting people from harm. Dan next to him asked him who was trying to hurt people. He jokingly replied that he wanted to protect people from being harmed by (people) themselves. Dan asked in confusion: What happened to our American dream? He pointed to the destroyed neighborhood with a smile and said: This is the American dream, and we have achieved it. If we try to agree with his ironic nihilistic vision, we may also admit that his statement is both absurd and true. After the Watchmen was forced to disband, he did not retire. Instead, he cooperated with politicians, participated in the assassination of Kennedy, and engaged in anti-communist movements in Cuba. He did this not out of his own values, but of enjoyment. Bloodthirsty pleasure creates chaos for this world, and chaos-in his opinion-is the essence of this world. He was the first to point out that the watchman has lost its meaning, and that the world cannot be saved by cutting evil and eliminating evil. His sarcasm greatly stimulated Adrian Witt and changed the latter's thinking. But their disagreement is that he believes that mankind is not necessary to be saved, while Adrian Witt believes that it is necessary. So in the end, he was swallowed by a stronger imitator of his own-because Adrian Witt was serious, and comedians were just making fun.
Among the six heroes, apart from the only female Laurie, Dan seems to be the most mediocre and lacking in personality. He inherited a huge inheritance and didn't have to run for life. Out of the worship of Hollis Mason, who was the guardian of the previous generation, he inherited the heroic identity and career of the latter. But his heroic experience is full of disappointment, confusion, and frustration. He represents the educated liberalism tradition, kind, upright and simple, and believes in fraternity and peace, but the United States in the story is full of chaos, destruction, oppression, and resistance (in reality, American society in the 1960s and 1970s also The same is torn). Therefore, when the government banned the Watchers, Dan and his partner Rorschach had the opposite view. In Dan's view, this was not a setback but a relief. To quote a conversation between Dan and Rorschach:
Dan: The watchman is over.
Rorschach: This is just what Nixon said slickly.
Dan: This is what I said. No one knows who you are, you can let go at any time and live a normal life.
Rorschach: As you are now, a normal life? When you walk in this city full of crimes every day, do you really think this is normal?
Dan: At least I am not the one who is still hiding behind the mask.
Rorschach: No, you are hiding behind the mask of "the public".
Like Adrian Witt, Rorschach has no element of nihilism, but the two are so diametrically opposite: Adrian Witt believes that mankind can and is worth saving, while Rorschach believes that mankind has fallen and must be saved. been punished. Rorschach was born by a prostitute and a client. His mother hated him, and his children rejected and bullied him. He had never been loved, so he didn't know what love was, and lived alone. But he did not become a bad person. On the contrary, he became a masked knight, a good person who should be praised, but he is a little too good-he does not forgive any badness, so he is a complete thug , The people he has hurt may have as many Harmony Stars, and any bad guys will not end well if they fall into his hands. But comedians can eat well at least in black and white, and there is even a picture of him shaking hands with the vice president on his bedside. Rorschach was wanted by the police and pursued by the underworld. In fact, the original Rorschach was not so extreme, but just like Dr. Manhattan, Adrian Witt and Dan, Rorschach also experienced a change of thought in the process of participating in the Watcher. He personally came into contact with this secular The depravity and the countless crimes committed by people deeply irritated him, making him increasingly cynical, and eventually turned into a black and white moral fundamentalist who neither compromises nor forgives. He wrote in his diary:
Although the end is approaching, I will not compromise, so many crimes must be punished: there are so many retributions owed in this world, and there is only so little time left.
Therefore, Rorschach will never accept Adrian Witt’s way of deceiving the world to save the world. In Rorschach's view, if the salvation of mankind must be based on a lie, then mankind might as well perish. At the end of the story, he asked Dr. Manhattan to kill him, otherwise he would surely expose Adrian Witt’s lies. Then the 15 million people who have died would be sacrificed in vain. The United States and the Soviet Union will resume confrontation. Back in the shadow of the doomsday. And Dr. Manhattan does not allow him to do that, as the eloquent Adrian Witt said: the peace brought by lies is also peace. In front of his own principles, Rorschach did not make any value measurement at all, no matter whether the other side of the balance was human destiny or his own life, so he took the initiative to embrace his own bad luck.
Rorschach’s charisma impressed me, and of course it shocked me-maybe because I am a person who is easy to compromise-although he is hardly a good person, but when a person can do things to the extreme, or say Belief is carried out to the extreme, so regardless of right or wrong, this kind of spiritual power is enough to move people. In the final analysis, the ultimate life has value. Rorschach is not only an anti-social villain who resorts to violence at every turn, but also a hysterical poet who is thoroughly angered. "Luo Xia Ji" as a narrator in the movie is a dark "Divine Comedy" without redemption. He takes people to travel through the hell in which people live, pointing out each crime and punishment, and then executing the trial with his own hands. He fights against the whole world alone: he neither tolerates modern Western civilization, nor communism, the government, nor the people. He is wanted by the police and hated by criminals... When he was taken by Adrian. After Witte conspired to go to jail, when he was arrested by his own hands in prisons who hated him in the prison, he was still so strong and convincing: "It is not that I am trapped with you, but you are trapped with me! "—This vividly shows his relationship with the entire secular world: everyone has fallen or acquiesced to fall, only he alone rejects and punishes the world, and his existence stings everyone, because in him People in front of them seemed so humble, cowardly and hypocritical. This is a rare personal strongest voice. There is no compromise in him, so his personality is extremely strong and heartbreaking at the same time, because this kind of strength will inevitably come at the cost of his own destruction. , As Nietzsche said: I love that kind of person, he punishes his God because he loves his God: because he must endure the wrath of God and perish.
Compared with Adrian Witt, who saved mankind, Rorschach is a tragic hero. Because the hero must be a simple child, we can accept that the hero has a broken heart and has various evils, such as brutality and extremeness, but he cannot be a conspirator. After taking off the mask, Rorschach's name is Walter Kovacs. He is a homeless man. He has no job, no possessions, no friends. He has no interest in women, and certainly no men. He is just fanatical. Hate sin. His masked costume was hidden in the trash can in the back alley, tainting the stench, so people covered their noses and stayed away from him. He called his mask "Face" instead of "Mask". He wrote in his diary about this (I branched out presumptuously):
The dark alleys are cold and desolate,
I keep my identity
There, waiting for me,
My coat, shoes, clean gloves
And my face, put on them
I removed the pretense,
Become who you are,
No more fear and weakness,
No longer have desires.
Perhaps as Harold Bloom said, negative heroes have the effect of purifying the soul-this is why Rorschach attracts me-Bloom is not referring to those who are discouraged and pessimistic about life Negative people, but like Captain Ahab, self-destructive heroes who, like Captain Ahab, are desperate and unscrupulously devoted to a mortal cause. These people are always strong and ego, they will never be dusted by the world, they don’t care about their own gains or losses, they are always listening and following the ancient and eternal voice in their hearts, embracing rather than escaping their own bad luck-they are crazy Our own career becomes the first and final career of mankind, so we have to seriously think about our own life and death and meaning.
P.S.: The original work of "Watchmen" is the only comic work that has won the Hugo Award, and it has been translated into Chinese. The movie is 3 hours and 15 minutes long, but because it contains a lot of violent content, the formal platform provides a large abridged version. It is recommended to download the full version from other channels.
View more about Watchmen reviews
