This is from a guest writer and happens to be my intelligent, handsome boyfriend, Chris. Enjoy!
I’m not a graphic novel fan by any means. I have nothing against them, I just haven’t read enough of them or have been interested in them enough to say I’m in to them. However, a couple of years ago I read that The Watchmen made Time Magazine’s "Top 100 Novels of the Century", and I felt that that alone made it worth checking out. So I did, and I was completely blown away. I read a several more graphic novels after that, but I never found one that came close (with the notable exception of Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth) to the depth that The Watchmen had. All that to say that the novel, to me at least, defines another level of greatness for its genre; that’s why I went in to the movie adaption with low expectations, because it would be very difficult to execute a translation to another genre. It could only go south of perfection, right?
Unfortunately, my expectations weren’t low enough.
In retrospect, had I known who Zack Snyder was before I went in, I think I probably could have spared myself the surprise of feeling like I had just watched someone jack off on the Mona Lisa.
Visually, I thought the translation was as good as it ever could have been. The characters looked exactly like the novel’s, and it seemed to me that if you were to look at each scene frame-by-frame, for every one you’d find an almost exact replica of the novel’s still representation. The cinematography is fantastic. When a pane of glass is shattered, you can see each shard fracture again and again in slow motion, and then stopped and rotated to show a top-down perspective of a character’s spectacular free-fall demise. Within each scene, each shadow, splatter of blood, teardrop, camera angle, and transition seemed to be meticulously detailed, and was truly thrilling to watch.
So it looked pretty spectacular when Zach Snyder jizzed on the Mona Lisa, I guess. But that doesn’t make it right.
What made the novel great, to me, was that within one story, so many themes are wrapped up and presented with such clarity and profundity that anyone who gave it a serious read would have to admit that it deserves to be considered serious literature. It was what The Watchmen said about the human condition as it posed serious philosophical questions asked by men and women in spandex, and how it acknowledged the absurdity of that in the dialog between characters that made you lose yourself in the world of The Watchmen.
None of that was presented very thoroughly in the movie. It seemed like those things were eclipsed by fast action, gore, and flashy elements in the cinematography. And maybe that’s exactly what I should have expected from Snyder. After all, I’m sure those things will sell movie tickets just fine.
It’s a very difficult to transpose art between mediums and still retain the essential aura of the original, which is why I had reservations before watching The Watchmen in theaters. But I don’t believe that that fact excuses any failure to carry the original’s greatness. Nor do I believe that it’s impossible to succeed in equaling (or even exceeding) the original medium’s depth. Often, however, transposing the work of art to a new medium means that the new medium will have to fundamentally alter elements of the original medium, and the question is whether it can achieve this with the effect of presenting the art from a new perspective we couldn’t see in the original, or if it simply attempts to photocopy the old medium onto the new. The latter, in my opinion, is like someone attempting to plaster an oil-painting onto some stone, instead of creating a new perspective by chiseling away from another angle.
In many ways, I think this movie’s creator attempted to plaster an oil-painting onto stone. Except that it wasn’t the visual elements that weren’t endowed with that new perspective, it was the underlying depth that the book achieved that was left alone or absent in the movie. And I do think it would have absolutely been possible, albeit very difficult, to do that, only there was probably very little motivation to concentrate on the profound elements when the flashier ones are going to be selling tickets.
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