16 Years Later, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen Is Still A Frustrating Comic Book Movie

Watchmen is the most acclaimed comic of all time. Every great comic gets compared to it, and for good reason. Writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created a story that took the comic medium and turned it on its ear. For years, Watchmen was thought to be unfilmable, as so much of its story and its genius depend heavily on the way comics themselves work as a storytelling device. Multiple directors were attached to an adaptation over the years, but none of them could crack Watchmen. This lasted until the ’00s, when the rise of superhero movies as big money source was enarly guaranteed, and Warner Brothers tried again, going to a director that had just had a huge success from adapting a classic comic — Zack Snyder.

Zack Snyder is controversial director nowadays, with entire fan bases loving and hating his work. However, back in 2007, fans were very excited for his take on Watchmen because he was a director that seemed to not only understand how to adapt a comic, but also loved the source material. Snyder’s Watchmen is an interesting movie; it’s both slavishly devoted to Watchmen in many ways, but it’s also completely different. As enjoyable as the movie can be, and it is definitely an entertaining movie, it’s also quite frustrating at times, especially for fans who love Watchmen.

Watchmen Is a Feast for the Eyes, but It Ruins the Ideas of the Story

Watchmen is often lauded for its writing, but the art is also as important part of why the story is so great. Dave Gibbons brought the story to life, his pencils and colors creating a world that readers could lose themselves in. Zack Snyder understood the importance of the visuals of Watchmen, and his adaptation of it is visually brilliant. It’s simply amazing to see a world that once only existed on a two-dimensional page come to life so perfectly. Snyder definitely has a reverence for Watchmen‘s visuals, and it’s easy to see in every shot of the movie. Another director may have skimped on the details that made Watchmen’s 1985 such a different place, but Snyder embraced it, filling the big screen with minute details from the comics.

The character designs for the Watchmen movie were nearly flawless Doctor Manhattan, Rorschach, and the Comedian all looked like they stepped off the page into the real world, and even the ones that were changed, notably Nite-Owl II, Silk Spectre II, and Ozymandias, fit the characters and the world. Snyder was also able to get great performances from everyone in the movie. One can disagree with some of the changes made to the movie, but Snyder helped the actors really bring the whole world to life.

Finally, the action scenes are all great. People make fun of Snyder’s use of slo-mo, but the reason why it worked so well in 300 and Watchmen is because it showed the brutality of the violence. These are all people who had been fighting for a good portion of their life; the combat they’re entrenched in would be hard, fast, and bloody.

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However, as great as all of that is, Snyder’s Watchmen makes mistakes that can’t be overlooked by fans of the Watchmen comics. For example, as great as the action scenes look, Snyder often glorifies the violence, but Moore never meant for the story to tread down that road. Quite the opposite, actually, which is why characters like Rorschach and the Comedian are such reprehensible characters in the source material. This is another problem with the movie, but it’s one that even the comic fell into. Moore never meant for Rorschach to be the big hero. He wanted to show that Rorshach was not a role model, but a man who had been made into a monster by the world around him and his actions. Snyder’s Rorschach always feels like he’s a justified hero. He’s the Batman that Moore was trying to critique, and that’s a huge problem for the Watchmen movie.

Visually, Watchmen visually brings the comic to life, but it leaves a lot of the story on the cutting room floor. Ozymandias’s plan is different in how it works in the movie, which honestly is actually kind of an improvement. The lack of Tales of the Black Freighter cuts out an important part of the story, showing how one’s own fears can drive them to terrible acts — although at least there’s an animated version that exists and can be watched. Moore’s Watchmen was as much about the politics of the ’80s as it was a story that meant to completely change superheroes. The social commentary of Moore’s story is basically erased, which is something of a shame, since the ’00s were just as conservative and jingoistic in negative ways as the ’80s were. Snyder never really engaged with any of the ideas of Watchmen, just presenting the story as seen on the page It’s certainly a way to adapt a story, but something is missing.

Watchmen Is a Good Movie That Could Have Been Great

There are some Watchmen purists out there who don’t want anything but the comic. They don’t like prequel comics like Before Watchmen or the DC Universe crossover Doomsday Clock. They don’t like the new animated version of the comic, and they don’t want DC Studios to reboot Watchmen for the DCU. They don’t like the HBO series, and they especially don’t like Snyder’s version of the movie. There’s validity in all of that to a degree. Snyder doesn’t really seem to understand any of the subtleties of Watchmen, and that’s the main problem with the movie.

Snyder’s Watchmen is frustrating because it does so many things right — perfect visuals, great art design, hard-hitting action, brilliant shot composition, and a great soundtrack — but it also gets so much wrong. Some audiences will try to say it’s a bad movie and that’s honestly not the case at all. Snyder’s Watchmen is one of his best works, and an argument can be made that it is his best. However, it’s the perfect example of a good movie that had the makings to be great, but never reached that potential.

That’s the biggest problem with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. It’s still fun to watch, but thinking about what it could have been makes it a frustrating experience.