![]() ![]() And the dense involution of the narrative might have seemed exhilarating rather than exhausting. He would also no doubt have been stirred by the costumes of the female superheroes Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman, both gamely giving solid performances who sensibly accessorize their shoulder-padded spandex leotards with garter belts and high-heeled boots. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down. Indeed, the ideal viewer or reviewer, as the case may be of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. ![]() Snyder’s film freezes its frame of reference in the 1980s, preserving the dank, downcast, revanchist spirit of the original and adding a few period-specific grace notes of its own, including time-capsule references to Lee Iacocca and “The McLaughlin Group.” There is also a nod of homage in the direction of “Apocalypse Now” and a soundtrack heavy with the baby-boomer anthems that still echoed in the ears of Reagan-era adolescents. Manhattan and various other colleagues and rivals were violent, ambivalent, treacherous and vain, even though they also seemed to be uniquely capable of saving the world from ultimate catastrophe. Their heroes the paranoid Rorschach, the shy Nite Owl II, the coldly post-human Dr. At the same time, they offered a self-conscious critique of the national preoccupation with muscled, masked crime-fighters. Gibbons confected a dour alternative chronology of cold-war America, defined by victory in Vietnam, an endless Nixon presidency, nuclear brinkmanship and pervasive social rot. The book was very much a product of its moment, both in the history of comics which were scouting new horizons of complexity and thematic ambition and in the wider world that “Watchmen” mirrored. The original graphic novel, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was published by DC in 1986 and ’87, first serially and then in a single volume, and it quickly gained a following in discriminating geek circles. “Nothing ever ends.” No indeed.) Also, an enhanced temporal perspective would make it possible to watch “Watchmen” not in 2009 but back in 1985, when the story takes place, and when the movie might have made at least a little more sense. If I had that power, the 2 hours 40 minutes of Zack Snyder’s grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology might not have felt quite so interminable. Manhattan’s existence is busy and fairly melancholy, but I do envy him his ability to perceive every moment of past and future time as a part of a continuous present. Manhattan, a blue, bald, naked dude with blank eyes and the voice of Billy Crudup. The only character in “Watchmen” who possesses actual superpowers resulting from an accident at a top-secret government research lab in the late 1950s is Dr.
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