Who’s Bitching At Watchmen?

Seriously people?  Seriously?  There is a time to bitch and complain, but this isn’t it.

Maybe I should come back a few steps first actually.  Here’s where I’m at:

I read Watchmen about four years ago for the first time.  This is the thing with books like Watchmen:  I compare it to works like those of Shakespeare, in which these are groundbreaking, genre defining stories.  Watchmen shaped comics for years to come.  Even now, the ‘deconstruction of the superhero’ is rampant in books across publishers and genres.  In the same way, Shakespeare defined the ideas that we see constantly in stories today.  Romeo and Juliet has been played out a hundred different ways with different characters and settings, for example.

But are these really the best examples of the genre today?  Can you relate to Watchmen as well as you could something that was only just recently published that waded in the same waters?  If you go back to the original text of Romeo and Juliet, will it read as well as a more modern interpretation to you?  My point is that the original instances of a piece of art can inspire thousands of later artists, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the end-all be-all, or that it’s the best example of an idea; it’s simply the first.

I have two points I’m going to make here.  This is the first: Changes were made, get over it.  Watchmen isn’t the holy word of insert-deity-of-choice-here.  That being said, Snyder fought a hard, hard fight to keep this movie from getting movie-executive’d, from making this into the next Fantastic Four, and to maintain a level of comic-to-film translation that we have never, ever seen.  He took panels of the book and brought them to life, page by page.  He gave us the exact same brutal Rorschach as in the book.  The same sonnovabitch but ultimately sad Comedian, the same cold Manhattan.  He threw so much fan service into the film that I know I caught maybe a quarter of it, and yet people are railing like mad.
Did you really hate the film that much, or is the fan-stick up your ass just being twisted by the fact that the giant squid was taken out?  The impression that I’m getting is that a lot of fan-based reviews are structured so that there are two sentences about how amazing the film is, and then seven paragraphs about what Snyder changed, and about how he betrayed the trust of the fans, and blah blah blah.  So there’s this initial outburst of ‘that was awesome’ and then just a bunch of crying that leaves the reader feeling like the movie is just one big disappointment.

I get the movie isn’t perfect.  I get there are flaws with the ending, and that perhaps we were cheated out of a more intellectual, pure conclusion than what is in the graphic novel.  Did that ruin the entire film?  Is the movie, the two and a half hours before the ending, just a big pile of suck?  The end result of things are the same, the pathway there was just a little bit different.  I guess if you can’t get your head around that, then maybe I’m just wasting bytes.  You don’t have to like it.  Rail, hate, do what you have to, but don’t discount the effort and the amazing transition this film made from a picture book format.

So, the second point: just like Shakespeare and Watchmen ushered in a new way to tell stories, a new seedling of an idea, so too can this film.  This is our chance to tell the studios, “Look.  Look at this success.  Look at what happens when Dr. Doom isn’t a little bitch.  Look at what happens when you don’t do emo Peter Parker with fourteen villains, or when The Punisher isn’t a joke.  Look at The Dark Knight, being a gloomy comic-based film, and look at Watchmen, making brutal, adult, pure reconstructions of graphic novels and being a resounding success.”  This is our chance to make the Watchmen film the sort of springboard that the first Sam Raimi Spider-man film was, or the first Nolan Batman.  Comic book based films have a chance now, but this business is about money.  So Watchmen can flop or Watchmen can have a massively successful second week, and that will, I guarantee, be a huge piece of evidence for or against faithful comic book adaptations in the future.  Don’t let the little things hold back your enthusiasm, don’t let them ruin the experience for you, and if you feel like seeing it again, give it another go, with an open mind, and see what you think.