Tonight, the majority of Stadium 110 made an excursion to Lakeville to see the film Watchmen. I was personally very excited to see the film as a fan of the comic book, and I was both disappointed and pleased that I saw it. To explain my thoughts on the film, allow me to first explicate my over-the-top love of the comic. Watchmen is one of my favorite books of all time, following The Sirens of Titan and Slaughter-House Five. This is because it is a comic book, because it HAS to be a comic book. Alan Moore uses the various panels of the comic book to create multiple parallel storylines and raise attention to the fact that you are reading a comic. This is called modernism, and Watchmen is the only modernist comic I've read. That being said, the key difficulty in creating the film was making a movie out of something that is supposed to be a comic and only a comic. The comic within a comic, the news headlines paralleling that comic, and the "excerpts" from publications where what made me love Watchmen.
Going into the film I was prepared for disappointment, but I was not as disappointed as I expected to be. To the film's credit, it is the most faithful literary adaptation I've ever seen. Many of the lines are copied from the comic word for word, and the storylines that are left out are still referenced. The film attempts to retell the plot of Watchmen and sacrifices the modernist and artistic statements made in the comic. In terms of retelling the plot, Watchmen recieves an A. Although for a newcomer it may be difficult to follow, the cinematography follows the frames of the comics perfectly and there are very very few changes that are actually for the better in the film (spoiler: no giant trans-dimensional being appears). Unfortunately, I don't love Watchmen for its story, I love it for being a comic and stretching the boundaries of what a comic can do. The only way I could appreciate the film as much would be if it similarly stretched the boundaries of film, which Zach Snyder is incapable of doing. The film is fairly typical, just highly stylized and colorful. I don't want to attack Snyder, because he has chosen 2 very difficult comics to adapt to film, but he just isn't a profound enough thinker to direct Watchmen. Alan Moore never wanted his comic to be made into a film, and his fears were correct. While Watchmen is a fine retelling of the plot, it misses the intricacies and reflexivities that made the comic a masterpiece.
