10 Movies You Constantly Have To Defend Hating
2. Watchmen
For decades, Alan Moore's 1986 superhero epic Watchmen was deemed "unfilmable". Various scripts were passed around directors such as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass, with none ever seeing the light of day. Then, Zack Snyder was brought on board, fresh from his well-received adaptation of Frank Miller's 300... and thus everyone was proved right.
Watchmen is not what anyone could call a badly made film. On a visual level it is lovingly-crafted, if a little over-processed as Snyder is guilty of, and on the surface its almost rigid adherence to the source material should make it the perfect adaptation of the graphic novel, right? Right? The film's many fans seem to think so, and will hold this up as one of the greatest comic book adaptations of all time.
Unfortunately, said adherence is only present on the film's surface. Despite sticking to the comic's script and dialogue almost verbatim, Snyder turns a withering critique of the superhero ideal into an uncritical celebration. Every slight deviation from the comic that he makes serves to hurt and undermine the source material's message. Fight scenes are unnecessarily extended and filled with tiresome Snyder-brand slow motion; violence is elevated to a frankly nauseating level; and then of course, there's the framing of Rorschach as the film's true moral centre, when in reality he is little more than a vicious, unhinged sociopath whose moral absolutism is a danger to all those around him.
Never before has a film worked from such nuanced source material and missed every point it was making so spectacularly.