Watchmen

After a tortured production history, Zach Snyder's eagerly anticipated Watchmen brings to the screen what the trailer proudly calls "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time" -- never mind that genius writer-magician Alan Moore disowned all adaptations of his work.

Although fans of Art Spiegelman's Maus might object, the claim is not too far fetched. No other comic book (Moore considers "graphic novel" to be a useless marketing term) has won a Hugo Award or made it on the Time Magazine list of most important books of the 20th century. None other gets regularly compared to Citizen Kane.

Recent commentators like Lydia Millet have had difficulties appreciating the book in hindsight, but it's hard to overstate the profound impact the series by Alan Moore and artist David Gibbons had on comics when it came out in 1986. Innovative in form and theme, Watchmen broke so much new ground for a mass audience that the landscape of comics was altered forever.

Adapting such a landmark piece of work is a tall order. Watchmen is widely considered unfilmable, and Snyder's adaptation fails on almost every level. Yes, Snyder, who gave 300 such vivid life, recreates the comic's most iconic visual elements: the blood-stained smiley face, Rorschach's morphing mug, the Owl Ship bursting out of the East River, Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue schlong. Most memorable lines of dialogue are spoken verbatim.

But aside from the superficial signifiers, the movie gets most everything else disastrously wrong. In fact, I daresay it's the worst adaptation of an Alan Moore comic yet. At least, the goofy League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had no pretensions of matching the original's finely tuned literary parlor games, V for Vendetta resonated with Bush-era paranoia, and From Hell had Johnny Depp.

Over the course of twelve issues, the Watchmen comic simultaneously celebrates and demolishes the superhero genre by laying out an alternate reality where Nixon is in his third term and zeppelins rule the sky. Through elaborate flashback sequences, the decades-long intertwined personal histories of a group of masked vigilantes are revealed, leading up to an inevitable global crisis. Each installment moves the main storyline forward while filling in crucial bits of back story with economy and grace. Panels are packed with information, detail, echoes, and puns, providing endless payoff for lingering over the dense artwork.

Rereading the series after a decade away from it, I was struck by how vividly I remembered individual images -- an indication of how long I once spent looking at these panels, comparing them to their neighbors to catch the many games the book plays with attentive readers. Watchmen the comic is an elegant fusion of form and content that unfolds its remarkably deep world with astounding efficiency.

Now, I believe that "faithfulness" in adaptation is something of a false dilemma. Changes are always expected and necessary. The critical and popular success of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy proved that if you worry about the needs of the story first, you can satisfy a mass audience and hardcore fans both.

Watchmen does neither. For someone who boasts of his "faithfulness" to the comic, Snyder has made an awful lot of tweaks. Many minor characters that fleshed out the world have been cut, an important secret is revealed during the opening credits instead of late in the book, and the importance of a sympathetic character is played up, Hollywood-style. And where are those strange pipes everybody's smoking in the comic?

Worst of all, Alan Moore's outrageously bizarre ending has been changed significantly. Why would you slavishly adhere to structural and visual cues that were designed specifically for the comic, and then go on to cut the book's central conceit, an idea so outlandish that without it, the film feels neutered?

The screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse simply capitulates before Moore's elaborate structure. At a loss about how to cram all the necessary information into its nearly three hour running time -- Why are there electric cars? Who's the guy in the hood? What happened in 1977? -- the film resorts to endless exposition.

Paradoxically, the writing is dumbed down but wordier: there's monologue after tiresome monologue, voice-over after redundant voice-over, followed by another origin montage and another conversation about the old days. The book uses clever framing devices unique to each issue, an effect much more suited to a mini-series than a feature film. Without an organizing principle, Snyder mangles the book's structure, making many of the flashbacks and expository detours seem arbitrary. As a result, the film never musters much narrative drive. The threat of impending nuclear holocaust, which supposedly motivates everything that happens, is mentioned but not felt.