Watching the Watchmen: Part 1

I’m planning to write something about Watchmen in the next couple of days, but one of the things I won’t be able to do is avoid echoing the view of critics as disparate as The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane and io9’s Meredith Woerner that in many ways the best thing about the film is its marvellous credit sequence. It’s certainly not the first time the heroes of the Golden Age have been lovingly invoked so their nostalgic glow can be undercut by a later, and darker reality — you only have to look to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or Alex Ross’ Marvels for two examples — but I suspect for sheer compression and beauty there’s nothing to equal Watchmen‘s montage of three-dimensional photographs and their sense of gathering darkness and loss, not least because of the inspired choice of Bob Dylan’s ‘The time’s they are a changin’ as the backing track.

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