“The movie, at its core, is a technological-philosophical exercise,” Watchmen director Zack Snyder told Discover’s Science Not Fiction blog at Comic-Con 2009. “When the graphic novel was originally written, it was influenced by the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese and how it created this modern moral dilemma with the idea that you could kill hundreds of thousands to save millions and whether that was OK or not. The specific theme—more in the director’s cut than the theatrical version—is that the technology creates a god-man, and, by proxy, that technology is its own religion.”