And it is, you’ll understand, very much Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. Not Alan Moore’s. Though his graphic novel has been praised (?) as being “cinematic,” the great writer was correct in saying it’s unfilmable. What Snyder created is something that contains only echoes of the novel, though all the important points are there. One usually speaks of being “faithful” to an original work, but that isn’t always what’s called for. My favorite example of this is William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, the screenplay being a completely different animal from the novel, but both equally beloved. Goldman had the right idea, but few filmmakers have the courage to take significant liberties with someone else’s work.

In the novel, Rorschach is the star. Front and center, with the diary, with the ever-changing mask that betrays a greater range of emotion than his human face. But it was only inevitable that, in a purely visual medium, Dr. Manhattan should become the most fascinating character. While readers of the novel almost universally latch on to Rorschach as the most interesting of the vigilantes, the movie spends more time on the visually impressive (and equally compelling, really) big blue man. Ebert certainly experienced the fixation, and on his blog, he attempted to dissect the godlike figure:

He doesn’t lack emotion as the alien did in the recent remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” He has simply moved far, far beyond its reach. From where he stands, he might as well be regarding a termite. Why does he even bother to make love with Laurie Jupiter? Not for his own pleasure, I’m convinced.

Dr. Manhattan certainly presents us with the same kind of ontological crisis as a potential real-life god. Why, in fact, would he bother to do anything? How can we presume to know what makes him happy, pleases him? How can we trust him not to destroy us?

This question doesn’t seem as prominent in the novel. Maybe it’s because we don’t really get a sense of the scope of his abilities, the fact that he can and will do anything. I was always particularly fascinated by the non-chronological way in which he views time, something I felt the movie didn’t quite grasp in the same way the novel did. But it obviously didn’t take anything away from his fascinating self.

Ever since the advent of postmodernism, we’ve been pummeled with the idea that we’re nothing but specks of dust in the grand scheme of the universe. But even now, nearly twenty-three years after Watchmen was first published, it’s still fascinating to see this truth from a sympathetic point of view. Here is a creature who looks vaguely human, acts human, but is not human – is, in fact, so much more than human that he doesn’t even comprehend human problems anymore.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is not Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but it is a stylish, compelling, and affecting story in its own right. To judge it on any other merits than its own is foolish and unfair. Go see this film and enjoy it for what it is: a story of a past that might have been. A story of a man more powerful than any superhero. A story about human beings.

Popularity: 4% [?]