Who Watches The Watchmen? Me

The poet once asked, "Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned?" These are Bob Dylan's words. They come from a protest song. They come from a song that is not featured on the soundtrack to the movie version of "The Watchmen." I mention this because there are three other Dylan compositions heard over the course of the film, or about one an hour: "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "All Along The Watchtower," and "Desolation Row." In the alternative reality of the Watchmen where Richard Nixon is still president in 1985, Bob Dylan is still asking the musical questions that need answers.
The question being asked in "The Watchmen" is simple enough: Can a bunch of super heroes save mankind from itself? Or in the case of Doctor Manhattan, would he even care to? Setting the film during the Cold War compounds the feeling of "us versus them," and as the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to nuclear midnight, the line between the good guys and the bad guys gets fuzzier and fuzzier.
Superman used to fight for "truth, justice, and the American Way." In "Superman IV: The Quest For Peace," the Man of Steel seems intent on breaking from the political ideologies of his countrymen to work for nuclear disarmament at the behest of a kid who writes him a letter. When all the good and trustworthy governments send their missiles off into space for Supes to destroy them, a vacuum is created. Lex Luthor and his unscrupulous arms dealer friends swoop in to fill that void. Nuclear weapons, it seems, are a necessary evil.
Christopher Reeve is a much more benign presence than the Superman in Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns." In this one, Krypton's favorite son is the tool of a government that that teeters on the edge of fascism. Superman is sent to kill Batman for his vigilante ways. Order must be maintained, but not at the cost of the status quo.
Which brings us back to the Watchmen. In order to make nuclear annihilation unthinkable, it is important to think of something worse. Instead of having two countries mutually assured of the world's destruction, what if that power came in the form of just one man? The big blue guy, Doctor Manhattan. What happens if the guy who can destroy a planet with a thought has a bad day? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.