The TV Addict 

For comic books fan who have spent many years admiring Alan Moore’s graphic novel, a film adaptation of WATCHMEN has been a long time coming, and one plagued with no end of false starts – some promising, some not so much. Now it’s actually happening and based on the reception the recent trailer has received from comic fans, it seems most are excited about seeing Moore’s deconstructionist tale come to life.

Thing is, I’m not. In fact, I don’t think it should have ever been done in the first place.

The graphic novel is simply too dense and complex, with too grand of a thematic scope that makes it hard to translate to film. To me it is simply not adaptable. There is just too much going on in terms of action and ideas. Heck, one of the principle intentions of Moore’s work is the fact that it’s an ambitious attempt to deconstruct the unique parameters of superhero comics. That’s what makes WATCHMEN so subversive and transcendent at the same time. But that was all within a very specific medium’s (i.e. comics) conventions, and shifting its narrative to another medium entirely is just not going to work.

What doesn’t help either is that I seem to be one of the few people who thinks that Zack Snyder isn’t the right man for the job. As much as I DAWN OF THE DEAD as a fun zombie romp, I was one of the few who didn’t like 300, and thought it was a racist, homophobic, repetitive affair. Synder took a superficial Miller graphic novel, and turned it into an even more shallow film, which instills absolutely no faith in me that he can take something as heady as an Alan Moore work and turn it into anything intelligent. Instead we’ll probably just be bombarded with really cool visual, and little else.

That being all said, I’m still looking forward to the film, and still hope it might even turn out to be good. That can only happen though if the filmmakers maintain a certain distance from Moore’s graphic novel, adapt the central narrative spine of it, and avoid tackling the greater literary themes in it. Then they might do okay in creating an exciting – perhaps even progressive – superhero film. A WATCHMEN films needs to function on its own merits as a film. The moment it tries to attempt at Moore’s literary aspirations, it will prove why a loyal adaptation of WATCHMEN should never have been considered.

Now, I’m not an adaptation fanatic. In fact, one of my pet peeves is people who complain about movies based on existing works not being more like their source materials. Movies and books are just two completely different entities, and what works in a novel often simply won’t work in a film, no matter how bad some fans might want it to. A movie functions differently, and has to adhere to its own set of rules to work.

So what I am suggesting here is not that turning WATCHMEN into a movie was necessarily a bad idea. My point is rather that trying to faithfully adapt the graphic novel into a film is just not possible. That’s why I am actually very much looking forward to seeing WATCHMEN as a film on its own terms. I’m just not looking forward to it if it turns out be too loyal an adaptation.