Nostalgia for 1986
Did you guys see this story? It was all over the place: CNN, Gawker, etc. The Monster of Montauk!
Too bad it was a fake. Apparently some film producers whipped up a fake monster, put it on the beach, and sent out press releases as part of a viral marketing campaign, a la Cloverfield. /Film has the details here.
Which leads me to my main point: This whole Georgia-Russia situation is kind of ridiculous. It’s like the 80s all over again. Escalating tensions between East and West, the doomsday clock has started ticking again, unnecessary Russian invasions of a (relatively) peaceful state: Where are we, 1980? What if there is no “situation” in Georgia? What is this is all a viral marketing campaign for the Watchmen movie?
Think about it for a second. What’s Watchmen‘s biggest weakness? That it’s set in 1986 and stays truthful to the graphic novel’s depiction of a conflict between the United States and the USSR and the mounting tensions therein after the United States’s most powerful protector (Dr. Manhattan) disappears and the Soviets invade Afghanistan/Pakistan. How are people supposed to relate to that these days?
By reinvigorating the East-West race by engineering the invasion of an American ally by the Soviets (I mean, Russian Federation), that’s how! You’re good, Zack Snyder. Perhaps a little too good.
(All of this is a way of saying that I have nothing subastantial to add to the Georgia-Russia conversation. As a matter of power politics, Bush screwed this up by suggesting privately that we would back the Georgians and then doing nothing: he should have kept his mouth shut altogether or given a major address with the Georgian president saying “we’ve got your back: an attack on you is an attack on us.” By doing otherwise, he has allowed the Russians to expose us for what we are in the region: weak.)
Just for fun: Watchmen the trailer. This is little more than nerd porn; there’s no real sense of the plot or story development. All it is is a series of important images from the book that fans can see and say “holy crap, look how faithful they’ve been to the source material.” So it works for me. It might not work for you.