The Blue Guy

A new contender for Fantasy-Fiction's "Best Character in a Graphic Novel that was turned into a Movie" award - it's the Blue Guy, playing one Dr Manhattan from Watchmen on this occasion. See the bigger picture?

Blue Guy from Watchmen - aka Dr Manhattan

For those who do not know, Watchmen is a movie based on graphic novels or comic books by Alex Moore.

I am not a fan of comics and therefore never really got into graphic novels; therefore I usually avoid movies based on graphic novels such as Watchmen like the plague.

However, on this occasion I was desperately bored and the title seemed cool; I flicked it on and started to watch the Watchmen.

Now I must say that I enjoyed the layering of different ideas and stratas right off the bat. Intelligence was at work here, and vision. Wow. Don't expect to see that in a movie these days, and never mind a comic book based novel (I had to be hospitalised after watching the Hulk movie as a danger to myself and others! and carry the trauma of these events still ...)

But the moment I really woke up was when the blue guy made his entrance. Or rather, we made the entrance as the blue guy was just standing there, playing with his machines, something to do with radiation.

The blue guy (called Dr Manhattan in the story, his superhero nickname cause he got irradiated big time and lost his body altogether, now being only an energy body with a mind and some atom power to go along with that) is just stunning.

You can imagine that I can't look at the blue guy and think Lucian Tremain - instantly.

Ok, so he's a bit more weasly built and psychologically a whole lot softer, but that's clearly down to his upbringing. Still, he seems fair in bed ... I can't begin to imagine that stupid woman wanting to trade him for a fleshy nerd, but that's fantasy fiction for you.

The whole movie isn't bad at all. I mentioned to my son who knows a whole lot more about all of this than I do that I thought it was a touch too long and he told me that this was the general consensus in the world regarding Watchmen.

But in a way, that's not true. It isn't too long. The story is too long for one movie, that's the problem. A trilogy might have been made out of Watchmen and then things could have been unfolded with more elegance, without that sense of urgency and trying to stuff it all into a mere 3 hours, but I guess that would have been too much of a leap of faith (and investment) to those who made this movie.

So my take on that is that Watchmen is actually, about an 1 1/2 too short.

And now back to the blue guy.

Zach Whalen in his article "A Blue God of Deus Ex Machina" reckons that the blue guy is God in the story.

I agree that it often seems that way that Lucian Tremain and Dr Manhattan are God with their unearthly powers and of course, how people around them relate to them, and what they try to make them into, be it God or the devil ...

The blue guy isn't God.

He used to be a man.

And then stuff happened that made him be unable to still use that label upon himself, so now he doesn't know what he is.

Perhaps it's better to say that people like (!) Dr Manhattan and Lucian Tremain are somewhere in between - which is what all superheroes are supposed to be, right?

More than a man, less than a God.

But either way, if you have three hours to spare, and you don't watch superhero or comic novel based movies, you might want to give Watchmen a shot. It's intelligent, very sexy in places, some great "time dropping" (that's like name dropping only you drop time and events instead of names lol) which makes it spicy for those who actually remember the 70s - and then, and that's what makes it all worthwhile, there's THE BLUE GUY.

Definitely a contender for one of my fantasy awards!

SFX March 2010

PS. I think the blue guy is SO good, there should be a spin off movie, TV series, graphic novels if you have to have them, with ONLY him in it, and his fantastic installations on Mars - wow! How beautiful were they!

And for Project Sanctuary players, definitely a guy (a blue guy, even!) to visit. Say "Hi!" from me when you do :-)