Read the Comic or Watch the Watchmen?

Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's cult comic book classic is one of the most highly anticipated films since The Phantom Menace. Never before have nerds and fanboys been so eager to see a film and so unforgiving of infidelity to its source material. The comic was long deemed unfilmable due to its wild imagery, esoteric themes and multilayered plot, most vocally by the author himself. Snyder's answer to that was "why not?" and proceeded to make a doggedly faithful adaptation that translates the book to the screen at times word-for-word and frame-for-frame.

A note to the uninitiated: Watchmen is not just another comic book. Watchmen is the comic book. It is equal parts philosophy, noir mystery, apocalyptic black comedy and emotional character drama. According to Moore, one of his goals in writing it was to showcase certain elements that comics could bring to a story that other media could not. Moore uses the picture-book layout of the comic to frame iconic imagery to add thematic depth to the events in the plot. For instance, the image of the familiar yellow smiley face with a blood droplet over its right eye recurs in different forms: a clock with the hand set 5 minutes to midnight and grinning shark with a wounded eyeball to name a few. What does the image mean? Is it a statement about human nature? A countdown to nuclear apocalypse? Is it both? Reading Watchmen is a symbolic journey and the film succeeds brilliantly in recreating the thematically weighty imagery. Snyder makes no attempt to ‘realize’ the movie into a familiar setting or make the characters or plot any more believable than what happens on the comic pages—and it’s pretty wacky. The Dark Knight this ain’t. Watchmen is an ornate mythological tale that appeals almost exclusively to what little right brain moviegoers have left amid the shaky-camera, ‘docudrama’ style filmmaking that currently dominates modern cinema.

But alas, there are problems. Though Snyder hails his film as a labor of love, the result feels strangely soulless though it's not for lack of trying. Snyder's Watchmen is not an adaptation but a re-enactment of its source material which makes it fun to watch if one is familiar with the comic, but as a whole, the film rings hollow as inexperienced actors butcher Moore’s dialogue. After a spunky opening credits sequence, the meat of the film feels drawn out and uninspired as Snyder’s penchant for grindhouse-style violence and sexuality overshadows the story's intelligence.

Understatement is not Snyder's specialty but then again, it's difficult to imagine how any narrative could retain a subtle tenor when its main characters include a nerdy ex-crimefighter, a nihilistic detective with an inkblot face-mask and a fluorescent blue and totally nude demigod. But this is exactly what Moore accomplished in his 1987 comic series; Watchmen is a farfetched 'Twilight Zone'-esque fable about the exaltations and miseries of human nature in a time of apocalypse. In the film we see the comic's weighty and cataclysmic events depicted with cinematic virility, enhanced by a sensational score and perfectly timed editing and perhaps it is exactly this pomp that undermines the cleverness and sharp wit of perhaps the only comic than can truly be called ‘literature’. While reading the comic, one is allowed to muse over the symbolic undertones of the story's labyrinthine plot while enjoying the participative process of interpreting its symbols and taking sides with characters. A film by nature must be more straightforward. The original Watchmen was a pallet for interpretation and inference, but the film is unavoidably concrete.

- B-