Hopelessly Devoted - Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is as faithful an adaption as a fanboy could want
Originally published at Watchmen News. You can comment here or there.
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is as faithful an adaptation as a fanboy could want. By David Edelstein
From nymag.com:
Reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s splashy, blood-drenched superhero graphic novel Watchmen is a delirious experience-the eye races forward, circles back, and darts around the panels while the brain labors to synthesize the data. Every breed of crusader is here, working in tandem or at cross-purposes, from the old-fashioned idealist in the cape and cowl to the paramilitary sociopath to the curvy femme in dominatrix garb. Now the narrator is Rorschach, a grotty right-wing nihilist in a stocking-cap mask; now it’s Dr. Manhattan, an iridescent blue giant in a cosmic funk who sits on Mars and sifts through lost time. While our heroes try to solve a murder mystery and forestall a nuclear Armageddon, there are flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks; chunks of prose memoir; a parallel comic-book saga (a character is reading a pirate comic); glimpses of apocalyptic news events on TV screens; and backstories that are literally that-they play out at the rear of the frame. When I read that Zack Snyder (300), the director of the movie, had vowed to stay true to the original’s spirit by moving the camera as little as possible (because, you see, comics are laid out a frame at a time), I had a Dr. Manhattan-size premonition of doom. Moore and Gibbons used every tool they could invent to push their medium to its limit-and their work is in the hands of people who’ve decided to cast off many of their own medium’s tools in a misguided attempt at fidelity. How could Watchmen not be dead on the screen?
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