So I just finished reading Watchmen and I think we can all agree it’s brilliant, but afterwards I watched the 2009 film version of Watchmen directed by Zack Snyder and I think it’s very underrated.
It’s perfectly faithful to the comic, unlike some films like V for Vendetta (which I haven’t seen but from the clips I have seen, it seems like it deviates a lot from the comic) and it didn’t have to add a bunch of pointless other things to pad the runtime like the animated version of The Killing Joke. Most of the characters are cast perfectly (especially Rorschach) although there are exceptions like Ozymandias, who cannot pull off a British accent to save his life. Visually, every frame of this film feels like it could have been a panel in the comic, with CGI being used effectively but not so much that it’s distracting from the realism of the story. My only other problem with it is that it leaves out some mildly important parts of the comic to keep a shorter runtime. For example, the psychiatrist character is just sort of there and isn’t nearly as well developed as in the comic, and the same goes for a lot of other characters that get full stories in the book that were restricted to a single scene with little to no dialogue. I was watching the theatrical cut so if anyone saw the directors cut or the ultimate cut it would be good to know if there were any changes made there that fix this.
As for what I think of Snyder in general as a director, I also think he’s really underrated. I think he’s like the George Lucas of directors, in the sense that we don’t really see his genius until years after his “worst” films when we see what happens when a big Hollywood studio like WB or Disney starts to dictate what happens to his ideas. The mere existence of the different versions of the Justice League film are undeniable proof of this. Despite all the criticism they get, I still love Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman and I think that WB should give Snyder more control over the overall story of the DCEU.
