(I was going to hold onto this and some more stuff until the beginning of the week, but we’re ready to go so let’s hit it during the weekend.)
I’m not one of those guys who says this work or that cannot be filmed. I don’t share the arrogance that demands faithful representation of a beloved piece of literature on the screen, and even with my own devotion to comic books and, of course, Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,” I always thought there was a great movie in there waiting to be unleashed.
I think it was Quentin Tarantino who once said he would never translate a comic book to the screen because there are just too many damn people to please. There’s some truth there, mixed with a little pomposity. I had Zack Snyder’s back. I enjoyed “Dawn of the Dead” enough and was one of “300”’s few serious vocal champions. I would have preferred a director with a penchant for grit take up the reins on “Watchmen” but I found myself curiously okay with the stylized ballet Snyder seemed to be interested in creating.
But in a nutshell, “Watchmen” damn near stole my faith in movies. Maybe that’s a stretch, but come on, it’s all up there on the screen. Minus a climax that was likely changed for the better given what will and won’t work in a film, every inch of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s hard work is laid out for us at 24 frames per second. And you know what? It doesn’t work. And we can’t say anyone involved in the production botched the adaptation because it’s faithful to a fault.
I think we can blame the woeful, stomach-churning, cringe-worthy failure that this is on the frothing-at-the-mouth fandom that scared Snyder and company away from being creative, from understanding the value of compositing (a tactic Christopher Nolan has so expertly employed with the Batman franchise) and from, at best, realizing that the tone we manifest in our minds as we flip through a work of graphic fiction can’t be satisfied by lifting nearly every inch of hard-boiled, wordy (if eloquent) narration. God bless him for trying to please them all, but what they wanted ain’t art.
“Watchmen” is an awful, awful film.
