Watchmen: Film Vs Novel
Essay Preview: Watchmen: Film Vs Novel
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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have an interesting collaborative style for the Watchmen. The novel is full of well-designed three-dimensional characters and a delicately deliberate tangled web of sub plots artistically directing readers through an intricate story. The thought of something so overwhelming being translated to film is terrifying. Moore himself was offended that Hollywood would even attempt to summarize the Watchmen onto film, and He was right to protest.
Producers and studios had been re-visiting the idea of translating the novel to film since its publication. Where bigger and more experienced filmmakers had looked at it and deemed Watchmen as “un-filmable”, Hollywood was still determined to find someone naïve enough to endeavor the task. It was clear from the film that its director, Zack Snyder, was a fan, but as a career choice, he probably should have left Watchmen alone. Snyder had previously written and directed another graphic novel adaptation: 300 (with mixed reviews from the graphic novel fans), as well as directed a re-make of the classic Dawn of the Dead, a pretty ambitious resume to say the least.
Snyder wanted to do right by the novel. There are screenshots of the film that are relatively perfect recreations of the scenes from the novel, it was adequately visually dramatic and compelling, but the dialogue and lack of depth really irked me. The filmmakers had to sacrifice a significant amount of detail and subplots from the novel in order to squeeze any kind of sensible storyline into the time restraints of a movie. The examination of sexuality and gender inequality in the Minute Men subplot was one of those sacrifices, and would have brought a lot of attention to the film from a wide range of audiences that the novel did not reach, and most likely would have drawn attention away from a lot of the utter bewilderment that the film caused a great deal of viewers. There were many parts of the story that were changed entirely, for example: perhaps it was budget limitations that denied Veigt of burying his assistants in the snow. Rorschachs character differences were the most important to me. In the film, rather than Rorschach, Nite Owl II is the one who warns Ozymandias of the possible mask-killer. Dr. Manhattan was the only viewer to Rorschachs death, though in the film Dan is present. His psychological instability is not as intense and his character seems to be more functional and stronger. There were also a lot of unexplained, assumed, and confusing aspects of the story that were left in that could have been left out or at least briefly explained.
I do not believe that the movie was made for anyone who was not already a Watchmen fan. Its complete nonsense. From the unexplained to the downright awkward; nothing could prepare audiences for an oversized anatomically correct blue man to grace the screen with his genitalia. Not even having previously been exposed to