While the Times and The New Yorker attempted to snark it to death in their reviews, Warner Bros. and DC Comics’ latest film adaptation of a superhero comic, Watchmen, was the big winner at the box house this weekend an estimated $55.7 million in ticket sales, beating out its closest competitor by almost $50 million. Based on the seminal twelve issue series from 1986-87, authored by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, the film is the most recent and–in my opinion–most refreshing in a series of films adapted from Moore’s comic books, all of which Moore has declined to attach his name. Both the film and the comic construct an alternative Cold War chronology in which masked crimefighters existed and affected world history. Most notably, America won the Vietnam War through the intervention of the godlike Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). This aprovided Richard Nixon with the political capital to repeal presidential term limits and be re-elected into the mid-‘80s.

Two notable factors separate Watchmen from most of the general superhero trend we’ve seen at the box office over the past couple of years:

1. Moore’s characters represent the “deconstruction” of the superhero, by showing us how messed up a person would likely be if he decided to don a costume and beat up street criminals. One of the film’s main protagonists, a masked avenger named Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), is an unwashed, homicidal sociopath. His former crimefighting partner, the gadget-reliant Nite Owl (II) (Patrick Wilson), is an effete liberal with too much time on his hands and an interest in ornithology, and is unable to complete a sexual encounter with another “legacy” superhero, the Silk Spectre (II) (Malin Ackerman), when out of costume. But these petty examples of superheroic demythologizing pale in comparison to the series/film’s climax (that I won’t ruin) which leaves one wondering who the “hero” of the narrative was.

2. Watchmen engages with geopolitics on a level beyond any other superhero film of recent years, with perhaps the exception of last year’s Iron Man. Though the New York Times claimed that its being set in 1985 and treating with the Cold War made the story irrelevant to a contemporary audience, the effect that a state-sponsored nigh- omnipotent superbeing would have in geopolitics is at least interesting to explore. While the U.S. is able to maintain its strategy of mutually-assured-destruction through the person of Dr. Manhattan, the Soviets are still required to create an ever greater number of nukes. When Dr. Manhattan decides to take a hiatus from the planet, the leads to a series of events that are among the most disturbing events ever depicted in the superhero genre. In scenes reminiscent to Doctor Strangelove  we see the precarious fate of humanity being decided by a handful of out-of-touch bureaucrats whose nuclear brinksmanship had become lazy in its reliance on a single superpowered individual. While one cannot help but chuckle at the image of Kissinger and Nixon being advised that things would not be so bad even if we lost the East Coast because the wheat belt would survive the initial exchange with the Soviets, the chuckle is a grim one—if the same class of elites who continued to build our nuclear arsenal through the ‘70s got their hands on a superbeing with the power of Dr. Manhattan, their own thirst for power and ideology of rule from above would create the kind of world depicted in Watchmen.

Democratic socialists support the expansion of democracy in order to make social, political, and economic life truly participatory. This means we must overcome the old ideologies which argue that CEOs and professional politicians know best and need to make the decisions that affect our daily lives for us. Watchmen presents an important opportunity for socialists to engage with our friends about what a real democracy would be like and how stifling, autocratic bureaucracies are not only immoral but dangerous to human existence. Much like the world in Watchmen, we’re facing our on-coming cataclysm in the form of the climate crisis. Our job as socialists is to connect the dots between the governmental and corporate bureaucracies that are responsible for the lack of decisive action to save humanity. Watchmen can be a reference point.