4-1 "Watchmen"

Warning the information contained in this blog will divulge the ending of the movie Watchmen.

A lot of hype has been on the new movie Watchmen. The movie depicts a cast of superheroes that are not exactly what you would expect. The superheroes depicted in the film are not exactly what you would think of when you think of superheroes, but most of them still act in a moral mannerism. I will explain this by stating how some of the watchmen don’t act the way a superhero should and how some still do the right thing in the end.

The whole movie revolves around a group of heroes that try and help the world by fighting crime. The world is a different place though. It is a world that has evolved with the presence of these heroes. Nixon is still president and in his third term he files a law that states that all superheroes with the exception of The Comedian and Doctor Manhattan are to stay out of the affairs of the public, however, Rorschach, another hero stays on illegally.

The idea that superheroes would give up on saving the world just because the world doesn’t want them is not a hero trait. And in the movie there are other non hero traits the so called hero’s commit. The first is that The Comedian rapes one of his fellow superheroes. The other is that one of the heroes destroys a city to bring the world together in hatred toward Doctor Manhattan in the belief that he was the one that destroyed the city. And the last is that the other heroes find out about the plot but conspire to keep it a secret. They end up killing Rorschach because he was not willing to keep the secret.

However, the actions taken do in fact maintain the ideals of a superhero. A superhero is supposed to put the safety of the majority ahead of anything else, and in destroying the city they kept the world from committing nuclear holocaust. And in killing Rorschach they averted the world from finding out the truth.

All in all the watchmen were in fact heroes even when they didn’t do what one would see as hero type actions. They killed their fellow heroes, innocents, and acted like pure jerks, but they did it in hope of keeping the world from destroying itself. If that is not hero characteristics I don’t know what is.