Watchmen: The Movie (March 2009)

I am afraid I haven't been nearly as vigorous in blogging lately, due to some complications surrounding wisdom teeth. (I am taking those teeth out perhaps a few years later than I should have.) But, while I am convalescent and having little to do or little thoughtful to add to a blog, let me just give a cheer for the upcoming Watchmen movie, based on Alan Moore's graphic novel, forthcoming in just seven months (huzzah!):



That is something to cheer about. I am hoping the film does the graphic novel justice.

Who watches the watchmen?

I would offer some savvy review here if I were not on painkillers. But I do want to celebrate what a beautiful work of art this trailer itself is. Look at it. The execution is flawless, the fitting of music to visuals is breathtaking in its perfection, as finely crafted as watchwork. The remixing of the Smashing Pumpkins lyrics is particularly inspired: at times nonsensical, yet terribly evocative:

Send a heartbeat to
The void that cries through you....

And in your darkest hour, I hold secrets' flame,
You can watch the world devoured in its pain

What moody beauty! And how true to Watchmen's sardonic look at the darker side to patriotism and the longing for heroes.

I think mood is a large part of the beauty of Watchmen, which can be at times relentlessly dark, and yet rich with hope and affirmation of humanity. One of my favorite quotations from the book:

"Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter...until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air into gold...that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle."

"But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle...I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!"

"Yes. Anybody in the world. But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget...I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come, dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."

That is something to think about.