Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Watchmen premieres this weekend, and I’ll be there with all the enthusiasm of a twelve year-old on a snow day, but you won’t be seeing any sort of review from me. What, exactly, would be the point? The movie lives in the shadow of its legendary source material, a 1985 graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore.

Hollywood has done nothing but take wrecking balls to Moore’s other work, leading the author to cut all formal ties with the movie industry. He has called Watchmen “unfilmable.” Frankly, I am inclined to agree. It’s not that it would be impossible to adapt the graphic novel to film, it’s that Watchmen the movie could never be to film what Watchmen the graphic novel was to comics.

Consider The Lord of the Rings. The books are masterpieces of literature. The movies are masterpieces of cinema. This does not mean, however, that the movies are masterpieces because they faithfully translate the books. Quite the contrary, the movies work because they preserve the essence of what makes the Lord of the Rings trilogy good while doing away with a lot of Tolkein’s boring, mythology-obsessed wankery. Frankly, there is a lot that can be cut from the books, and Peter Jackson had an uncanny knack for boiling away the poetry-laden fat.

This is not the case with Watchmen. In many ways, it is the perfect graphic novel. Not a single panel goes to waste, not a single sentence of dialogue is superfluous. To cut anything away is to damage the narrative. Chapter 4 (a snippet of which is above) explains the origins of Dr. Manhattan in such a way as to make you feel his otherworldly detachment, as well as a small remnant of nostalgia for his human life. Moore communicates this with prose that borders on free verse poetry. Certainly this is not “unfilmable.” You could cook something up with heavy-handed narration and decidedly French camera angles, but as a sane director, you’d quickly realize that it doesn’t work in the middle of a two hour and forty minute film. So, for the sake of a better film, you cut it, but in so doing, you weaken the character. It’s just the nature of something as artistically daring as Watchmen. The only acceptable way to tell the story is the way that Moore wrote it, and unfortunately, some aspects of it can’t be translated to a movie screen.

This brings me to the real reason why I will never bother to formally review Watchmen as a film: there is no need for it to exist. When I first heard that Watchmen was coming to the big screen, I was greatly excited, as were all of my friends and favorite bloggers. Then I started to wonder why they were bothering. As a comic, Watchmen is perfect. Why should making a movie out of it, one that will inevitably be inferior to the source material, be a cause for excitement? Can’t the graphic novel just stand on its own as a great work?

The crux of it is that all nerds want to be taken seriously, to be validated. They want everyone else to understand that all the time they spent huddled over a comic book was not just some childish waste of time, but the experience of a Truly Great Story. Comic Book: The Movie is the fastest and most dramatic way to make that case. Of course, it never really works out that way. Audiences turned out in droves for the excellent X-Men 2, all the while barely realizing that they were watching an extended metaphor about the coming-out process. Likewise, everyone loved The Dark Knight, but only a small fraction of its huge audience understood that the movie would not exist without graphic novels like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and indeed, Watchmen.

Early reviews of Watchmen back me up on this. If you’re an unabashed fanboy like Kevin Smith, the movie is “f**cking astounding!” On the other hand, the reviews by critics who have never read Watchmen sound as if they entirely missed the point. This suggests that perhaps Zak Snyder failed to translate the essence of the book onto the screen. So I’ll head into the theaters this Friday with my expectations low. I hope to be entertained, and I hope for the best. I do not expect it to be anything like the original.