Unfilmable? Spoiler-Free Thoughts on Watchmen
Just for the record:
Putting aside my glib and dismissive tweet, which you see above, I really disliked Zack Snyder's Watchmen not for any of these specific issues, but because it was in general an artistic failure.
It seems to me that the essential core of what Watchmen is, more so than most comics, is tied to the form of the graphic novel. So when you try to lift things straight out of the comic and plop them into a film, such as for instance trying to take the text of Rorschach's journal and make it into a voice-over narration, or trying to preserve the juxtaposition of an interview with an action scene, or trying to turn Dr. Manhattan's flashbacks into something that's coherent on the screen, you're losing the core of what made it work in the first place. It just ends up looking like any old third-rate, fairly stupid superhero movie, albeit one with a high budget.
Look at Lord of the Rings, for a counterexample. Friends of mine are aware that I'm not a great fan of Tolkien's novel or Jackson's films, but I'd call those films successful as adaptations (not just critically and commercially but artistically as well). I think that the essence of what Lord of the Rings is all about is in a very real sense tied up in its textuality, much like what I said above about Watchmen, and so trying to "faithfully" adapt it in the way Zack Snyder has "faithfully" adapted Watchmen would have been stupid. Instead Jackson made a film about the same characters, events, and themes, but he made something that was as much tied up in its film-ness as the original was in its textuality.
Can that be done with Watchmen? Maybe not. If that's the case, then a film adaptation should never have been attempted. It's been said by many, including Alan Moore, that Watchmen is unfilmable. Whether that's actually true is irrelevant, because an adaptation isn't a matter of "filming" a book. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was unfilmable, and so they didn't try to film the book, they tried to make a movie. And in a lot of ways it worked. Zack Snyder tried to film Watchmen, and in a way he successfully did just that, and it was awful. But perhaps its a good thing that they did, because I've always held Lord of the Rings as an appropriate example of what an adaptation should be, and it's nice to have a counterexample of a movie that is an utter failure.
And that, in general, is the problem I had with Watchmen. I also had a lot of more specific problems with it, but they matter less, and most of them are either general problems that a lot of movies have (awful acting, uninteresting direction) or just specific manifestations of the general problem I've discussed above.
You'll probably go see the movie regardless of what I say, as well you should. This was my opinion; get your own. I just hope you'll check out the graphic novel first so you know why Watchmen is special, and why it's so disappointing that this movie isn't.
