New York Times: Watchmen - Dr. Manhattan's Melancholy Fits Our Economy

Is Dr. Manhattan our new 'everyman?'

A.O. Scott calls the new Watchmen a "grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology."

The epic has become a metaphor for the U.S. economic crisis - painful, stumbling and dark.

Here's an excerpt from Scott:  "The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic."

Not a ray of light in sight.