Re-Reviewed: Watchmen completely missed the point

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen didn’t quite capture the nuances of its source material.

Alan Moore utterly hates the movies Hollywood has made based on his comic books and it’s easy to understand why when watching them. To date, none of those film adaptations have been particularly good. Frankly, if they’re even watchable it’s a mini-miracle. But out of all of them, the most unforgivable one might be 2009’s adaptation of Moore’s seminal series, Watchmen.

Moore’s treatise on all the issues surrounding modern comic book heroes has continued to be influential decades after its release. Not to put too fine a point on it but the movie has not. In fact, it might have completely missed the intention of the comics.

Alan Moore unleashes his Watchmen

Written by the legendary Alan Moore, the equally iconic Dave Gibbons and John Higgins provided art and colors respectively. When Moore conceptualized the story, he planned on using recently acquired Charlton Comics characters like Blue Beetle and the Peacemaker.

As anyone who has read the comics knows, this would have left any characters involved completely unusable in any other story after that. Instead, Moore created original characters for the series. It’s hard to ignore the similarities between Peacemaker and The Comedian, though.

DC originally published the story as a maxi-series that started in 1986 and ended in 1987. Most people have read it in its collected edition which was released later in 1987. Very few self-respecting comic book aficionados do not have a copy of that book on their shelves.

This was a rare situation when a comic book was both a commercial and a critical success. It has continued to appear on any variety of “best of” lists and is considered required reading in many circles, even to people who don’t normally read comics.

Zack Snyder unleashes his Watchmen

Attempts to adapt Watchmen to the big screen started as early as 1986, the year the first issues were hitting spinner racks. Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver bought the film rights for 20th Century Fox that same year and remained with the project through its many incarnations.

The project was ostensibly stuck in development hell for the better part of two decades. Different screenwriters and directors came and went with nothing concrete happening. It often felt like a two steps forward, three steps back type of situation.

In 2005, Zack Snyder was brought in as the director. He had recently come off a popular turn adapting Frank Miller’s 300 into a movie. As such, Warner Bros. and everyone else involved felt he was the man to do the same with Watchmen.

The response from critics and moviegoers was, at absolute best, middling. Watchmen was, by no means, a box office bomb but it certainly underperformed. It’s hard to say why, though it might simply come down to the fact that the comics are not adaptable to a feature film.

What went wrong?

A film adaptation of a nuanced and layered comic book like Watchmen should have led to box office gold. It didn’t. Snyder’s film was too faithful for people who had never read the comic and not faithful enough for anyone who was a fan.

The runtime was closing in on three hours which was way too much for most viewers. On top of that, people who had never read Moore’s comics were confused by the plot. Critical details had to be cut to keep the time down, something that significantly muddied the narrative.

A story like the Watchmen requires time to lay the story out in a fashion that can be thought about and internalized. That’s just not possible in a film. What fans were left with was a hollow interpretation of the source material, one that was force-fed through the Hollywood meat grinder.

It’s easy to blame Zack Snyder for this. But like Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, no director could have done a better job. Some comics were meant to be comics and nothing else. Watchmen may be one of them.

Have you seen Watchmen? Do you think it holds up as an adaptation of the comic? Let us know in the comments below!