Why wear a mask? The 2019 edition of Watchmen has a lot to say about it, giving reasons that seem deep, like because of "the wounds of injustice," to "protect myself," and "to be cruel." But let's not forget that the most common explanation for wearing a mask is to pretend.
In recent years, there have been sequels to many classic works, such as "Blade Runner 2049", "Terminator; Dark Fate", "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"... and this show is also among them. Of course, the appearance itself is also an achievement, but the detachment stems from the excessive political correctness of this era. Political correctness itself is a false mask, but it cannot deceive the audience.
It's not necessarily the political message that audiences are dissatisfied with, but the inadequacy and inadequacy of the story in the first place.
The writers can arrange for Dr. Manhattan to use the time paradox (I fell in love with you because you stood up for me ten years after we were in love) to forcefully fall in love with the heroine, but cannot force the audience to fall in love with her. In fact, in the whole play, she is just a tool with the function of connecting, eating a memory today, in order to express the past of her grandfather, and eating an egg tomorrow, in order to arrange the inheritance of Manhattan.
In the original "Watchmen", there is not a single morally immaculate character. In contrast, the new heroine is a simplistic, conceptualized, flattened failure.
Black characters, even if they are the protagonists in name, cannot be deeply portrayed, which already reflects the hypocrisy of political correctness, or at least the mismatch between desire and ability. The screenwriter is obviously incapable of portraying the real black people with flesh and blood and the diverse and diverse community interactions like "The Wire", and can only write the black people as white people in black skins - ironically, the protagonist's husband is literally dressed in a suit Black leather.
The only black man who stands out in the film is the protagonist's grandfather ("The Hooded Judge"), who comes closest to being a true Watchman-esque hero, even though he reverses the origins of Watchmen. But his struggles still seem too black and white. In this play, if white is not completely equal to bad, then at least black is definitely equal to good. There is indeed no black villain in the play, which is actually another kind of discrimination. Although black people can be the protagonists, they are not qualified to be villains. Because the villains often show the real desires of human beings, and the protagonist is just an illusory projection of Wei Guangzheng.
And this black-and-white distinction is obviously not applicable to the Trump era that this drama intends to insinuate. We were surprised to find that almost all of the oppression of blacks by whites in the play takes place in memory, rather than portraying contemporary racial antagonisms. Because history can be interpreted and fictionalized according to ideas - as the saying goes, history is a little girl who is dressed up - but what is in front of you can't be scribbled.
The story of a superhero is a temporary, fantastic, and even ironic solution to inherent social contradictions. The most classic is the ending of the original "Watchmen". The solution to the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is not that Dr. Manhattan or the Pharaoh directly killed the Soviet Union, so how can the conflict between the black and white races be solved by killing the KKK all at once? Of course, we can also say that since the portrayal of racists in this show is so cartoony, they only deserve to be turned into flying ashes in a cartoony way.
However, since the white Seventh Knights have already occupied a 100% evil ecological niche, then the police on the opposite side are basically 100% righteous, which obviously completely abolishes the core of the original book - the torture of power .
Who watches Watchmen? This famous question is the core contradiction of the original "Watchmen": how can ordinary people restrain Superman, and how can ordinary people supervise the government? Clearly, Watchmen is not concerned with superpowers, but with power. This alone leaves the Justice League (1960) and the Women's Federation (1963), which debuted 20 years earlier, far behind. Even in 2019, when the Women's Federation was consummated in the universe, there was no serious discussion about the relationship between the Women's Federation and the US government. Let's put aside the confusion of the Earth's own account.
I just didn't expect that in 2019, the new "Watchmen", with a smart face (tools), kept respecting the original work, but degenerated into a mute. The question of "who looks at the watchmen" has completely lost its meaning. Since all the villains - the knights, the big financial groups - are not the result of spontaneous growth, they are all different from the beautiful world inherent in human beings, so they are the same as the original book. What's the difference between the big octopus that fell from the sky?
When the confrontation between people becomes the confrontation between concepts (blacks, whites, proletariat, capitalists), and because of political correctness, a certain group of concepts will always win out, then the audience can only feel the IQ insults and emotional deceit.
Especially when this kind of insult and deceit can be done by Dr. Manhattan, in a literal sense of mechanical serenity. In the original book, Manhattan is the ideal incarnation of rationality and science, but in the end, this rationality cannot judge the right and wrong in the world, and can only go to Mars to "try to create life". As a result, this attempt was completed in only three minutes in the episode. Since then, Manhattan has become a magician, and has nothing to do with science anymore. If he wants to build a high-tech device, he has to ask the Pharaoh for it.
Those who know a little about the history of physics should be able to see that Dr. Manhattan is actually a "Laplace Demon" who "knows the exact position and momentum of every atom in the universe, and can use Newton's laws to show the entire process of cosmic events, the past and The future." However, this was an assumption made in 1814, and it is certainly not convincing in the contemporary age when everyone knows "indecision, quantum mechanics", and also makes him obey Newtonian fatalism.
The doctor who finished the work of God in three minutes, obviously has no interest in science. He is not at all curious about how to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, and he feels that he has exhausted the truth of the universe, only "Don't ask me who I am, please come with me." Fall in love" and "death if you're addicted to it". But I don't know why, whether the Knights or the big consortium, I don't know if I read the script or the doctor's psychological report, but they are all confident that they can capture Manhattan alive?
The original author, Alan Moore, is said to be an anarchic far-left, but he did not reduce the work to a graphic illustration of political ideas, which reflects his artistic genius. Perhaps the ultimate superhero story is that the bullet of the idea is caught with the bare hands of reality, rather than the wrench of obscenity that secretly stuns reality.
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