4. Zack Snyder Adapts Watchmen (2008) As An Awesome Superhero Movie; Forgets That Source Material Is A Satire
Watchmen is, without a doubt, one of the finest works of the past century - never mind the format or the medium, it simply is. If you haven't read it, it might be hard to imagine how such a thing were at all possible. If you've read it, though, chances are that you'll probably agree with me. f you've only ever seen the movie adaptation, then... well, unfortunately you've been exposed to an entertaining but otherwise shallow interpretation - one that totally and utterly misses the entire point of Alan Moore's seminal comic series. That's to say, when Zack Snyder got his hands on this thing, he set out to do it justice by remaining as "faithful" as possible, which meant shooting the movie according to the panels of the comic book, and leaving almost nothing out. I admire him for that. Unfortunately, he missed one very crucial thing: Watchmen is supposed to be satire. Cold, clinical... the definitive "what if superheroes existed in real life?" - Snyder's movie drops all those associations in an attempt to make an "awesome" movie in that way that Zack Snyder does: all the distance that was required to make this work on screen was lost on super choreographed fight sequences, and characters who were made to look way too cool. Watchmen was written as a way of mocking established comic book pretensions - pretensions that Snyder piles on without restraint. The end result is a movie far too self-conscious to make the right points, and - rather ironically - ends up being a movie about the very things Watchmen set out to satirise.