00:00Imagine a world where superheroes are real. Now imagine they are all deeply fundamentally broken.
00:05It is 1985. The Cold War isn't cold anymore, it's boiling.
00:09The United States and the Soviet Union have thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at each other.
00:14The doomsday clock is sitting at 5 minutes to midnight.
00:17And in a luxury penthouse high above New York City an old man is being beaten to death.
00:21His name is Edward Blake, the comedian. He is a government-sanctioned weapon.
00:26A killer and someone is throwing him through a plate glass window.
00:29He falls, hitting the pavement below in absolute silence.
00:32A yellow smiley face pin clatters into the gutter.
00:35A single drop of blood splashes across its eye.
00:38The greatest joke the world has ever seen has just lost its punchline.
00:41And the end of the world has officially begun.
00:43Right out of the gate this movie tells you everything you need to know about its universe.
00:47The comedian wasn't a hero, he was a monster.
00:50He burned villages. He killed innocents.
00:52But he was the only one who saw society for what it truly was, a chaotic, violent joke.
00:57His death isn't a tragedy, it's the starting gun for Armageddon.
01:00The police have no suspects.
01:01But the police don't see the world the way he does.
01:04Enter Rorschach, a vigilante hiding under a trench coat and a mask of shifting, symmetrical ink blots.
01:09He doesn't have superpowers.
01:10He just has an absolute, uncompromising, terrifying sense of right and wrong.
01:15He stands over the comedian's blood in the rain.
01:17He realizes this isn't a random mugging.
01:19Someone is hunting masks.
01:21Rorschach begins to warn his old teammates.
01:23The retired hero, but they are all ghosts of their former selves.
01:26Dan Drabert, Night Owl.
01:28He is soft, out of shape, hiding in his basement with his old gadgets, completely impotent without his costume.
01:33Laurie, Jupiter, Silk Spectre.
01:34She never wanted to be a hero.
01:36She was forced into it by her mother.
01:38Now she is essentially a captive.
01:39A captive to the only actual superhero in existence.
01:43Dr. Manhattan.
01:44Dr. Manhattan was a scientist named John Osterman,
01:46torn apart in a nuclear physics accident and reassembled as a glowing blue omnipotent god.
01:51He can see time simultaneously.
01:53He can alter matter with a thought.
01:55He is America's ultimate nuclear deterrent.
01:57Dr. Manhattan is the terrifying reality of absolute power.
02:01He is an evil.
02:02It's much worse than that.
02:03He is indifferent.
02:04When you can see the molecules that make up a living human and the molecules that make up a rock,
02:08you realize they are exactly the same.
02:10He is losing his connection to humanity.
02:12And without him, the fragile peace between the US and the Soviets will shatter.
02:16The killer knows they can't assassinate a god.
02:19So they use something sharper than a bullet.
02:21They use the media.
02:22During a live television interview, Dr. Manhattan is ambushed.
02:26Reporters accuse him of giving his former colleagues and lovers terminal cancer.
02:30The radiation he emits they claim is toxic.
02:33The god loses his temper.
02:34For the first time he feels overwhelmed, cornered.
02:37So he leaves.
02:37He teleports millions of miles away to the sterile silent dust of Mars.
02:41And the second the blue god leaves the chessboard, the Soviets invade Afghanistan.
02:45The doomsday clock moves to one minute to midnight.
02:48Nuclear war is no longer a possibility.
02:50It is a certainty.
02:52Meanwhile, Rorschach is getting too close to the truth.
02:54He is framed for murder.
02:56He is surrounded by SWAT teams.
02:58He fights like a feral dog but they take him down.
03:00They rip his mask off.
03:01They reveal a sad, ugly, broken man named Walter Kavax.
03:05They throw him into a maximum security prison.
03:07A prison filled entirely with men he put there.
03:09If you take a wounded animal and put it in a cage with predators, the animal usually dies.
03:14But Rorschach isn't the prey.
03:15An inmate tries to shank him in the cafeteria line.
03:19Rorschach doesn't flinch.
03:20He shatters a glass pot of boiling cooking fat and pours it directly over the man's face.
03:24The cafeteria goes dead silent.
03:27Rorschach looks at the terrified inmates.
03:29He delivers the hardest line in cinematic history.
03:32None of you seem to understand.
03:33I'm not locked in here with you.
03:35You're locked in here with me.
03:36Rorschach is a fascist.
03:37He is a psychopath.
03:39But the movie forces you to respect him.
03:41Because in a world full of politicians lying to keep the peace and heroes hiding in their basements,
03:46Rorschach is the only one who refuses to compromise his identity.
03:49He would rather die in the dirt than live a lie.
03:51Outside the prison walls the world is falling apart.
03:54Riots in the streets.
03:55Nixon preparing the launch codes.
03:57Dan Draberg looks at the television.
03:59He looks at Laurie.
04:00They realize they have been pretending to be normal for too long.
04:03They suit up.
04:04They board the owl ship.
04:05First, they break Rorschach out of prison in a sequence of absolute brutal violence.
04:10Then Dr. Manhattan suddenly appears and teleports Laurie to Mars.
04:13He needs her to give him one good reason why he should save humanity.
04:16This is the philosophical core of the film.
04:18Dr. Manhattan builds a massive intricate clockwork palace out of pink Martian glass.
04:23He ardues that life is a highly overrated phenomenon.
04:26The universe is perfectly ordered without the chaos of humanity.
04:29Laurie begs him.
04:30She cries.
04:31She pleads.
04:31But the god is logic incarnate.
04:33Logic doesn't care about tears.
04:35Then Manhattan forces Laurie to unlock her own repressed memories.
04:39The truth about her father.
04:40Her mother didn't just have a fling.
04:41Her mother fell in love with the man who once sexually assaulted her.
04:44The comedian is Laurie's biological father.
04:47Laurie breaks down.
04:48She's the product of trauma and violence.
04:50But Dr. Manhattan stops.
04:51He looks at her.
04:52He sees the infinite impossible odds of her existence.
04:56From the chaos of war.
04:57From the horror of assault.
04:58From two completely broken people.
05:00Came a life.
05:01Fies all logic.
05:02It defies probability.
05:03It is a thermodynamic miracle.
05:05Manhattan realizes that humanity's chaos is exactly what makes it beautiful.
05:09He agrees to return to earth.
05:10But it's too late.
05:11Dan and Rorschach are finally tracked down the killer.
05:14The mastermind behind the dead comedian.
05:15The cancer framing the entire conspiracy.
05:18It is Adrian Waite.
05:20Ozymandias.
05:20Their former teammate.
05:21The smartest man in the world.
05:23He is hiding in Karnak.
05:24His crystalline fortress in Antarctica.
05:26Dan and Rorschach break in.
05:28They prepare to fight him.
05:29They think they are in a standard comic book movie.
05:31They think they are going to stop the villain's master plan at the very last second.
05:35Waite beats them effortlessly in hand-to-hand combat.
05:38Dan screams at him.
05:39He demands Waite stop the countdown.
05:41Waite looks at them.
05:42Not with malice.
05:43But with pity.
05:43Do you seriously think I'd explain my master stroke if there remained the slightest chance
05:47of you altering its outcome?
05:49I did it 35 minutes ago.
05:51Waite didn't build a bomb.
05:52He built energy reactors in the world's major cities.
05:55And he just detonated them, masking the explosions to look exactly like Dr. Manhattan's energy
06:00signature.
06:01Millions of people are instantly vaporized.
06:03Dr. Manhattan and Lori teleport into the fortress just as the news feeds come in.
06:07The US and the Soviet Union have immediately stopped fighting.
06:10Faced with the wrath of a vengeful, omnipotent god, humanity does the only thing it can do.
06:15It unites.
06:16Waite didn't destroy the world.
06:17He saved it by slaughtering millions of innocent people.
06:20This is where the film tracks the audience.
06:22Waite is a mass murderer, but his math is flawless.
06:25If he did nothing, billions would have died in a nuclear holocaust.
06:28He chose the lesser of two unimaginable evils.
06:31He created a utopia built on a foundation of rotting corpses.
06:34Manhattan sees the logic.
06:36Dan and Lori see the logic.
06:38They hate it, but they accept it.
06:39To reveal the truth now would mean the millions died for nothing, and nuclear war would resume.
06:44They all agree to keep the secret, all of them, except one.
06:47Rorschach turns around.
06:48He pulls his mask back down over his face.
06:50No, not even in the face of Armageddon.
06:52Never compromise.
06:53He walks out into the blinding, freezing Antarctic snow.
06:56He's going to walk all the way back to civilization and tell the world the truth.
07:00Dr. Manhattan teleports in front of him.
07:02Manhattan tells him he can't let him do that.
07:05Rorschach stops.
07:05He knows he can't win.
07:07He knows he's just a man in a coat.
07:08He rips his mask off one final time.
07:10Tears are streaming down his face.
07:12He screams at the god.
07:13Do it.
07:14Manhattan raises his hand, a flash of blue light, and Walter Kovac ceases to exist.
07:18All that is left is a smoking stain of blood on the pristine white snow.
07:22Vate looks at Manhattan.
07:23I did the right thing, didn't I?
07:25It all worked out in the end.
07:26Manhattan looks at him with cold, terrifying indifference.
07:29Nothing ends, Adrian.
07:30Nothing ever ends, and the blue god leaves our galaxy forever.
07:34The world is at peace.
07:35Dan and Lori hold each other in the new, quiet utopia.
07:38But back in New York in the messy, cramped office of a right-wing newspaper called the
07:42New Frontiersman.
07:43An editor is complaining that they have nothing to print.
07:46There is no more war, no more conflict.
07:48He tells a young intern to pull something from the crank file.
07:51The intern walks over to a basket full of crazy letters and conspiracy theories, sitting
07:56right on the top of the pile.
07:58His Rorschach's leather-bound journal, containing every single detail of Adrian Vate's plan.
08:04The camera pushes in on the journal.
08:06The intern reaches for it.
08:07The intern
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