Watchmen: As Envisioned by Zack Snyder
One of the most controversial superhero films is still a conundrum after 15 years.
Heyooo!! Happy 4th of July everyone! If you’ve got time to kill on this wonderful day off, there may be a 4-hour sci-fi epic directed by Zack Snyder calling out your name – and no, I’m not talking about Justice League.
Watchmen Week continues today with Zack Snyder’s controversial 2009 re-envisioning of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which has gained itself a strange reputation over the last 15 years.
MOVING PICTURES
As his future work with the DCEU would prove, Zack Snyder’s filmmaking style is extremely distinct, highlighting ornately composed frames and artfully graphic sequences of violence. And though this may be his most frequent criticism as a storyteller, Watchmen utilizes his visual language in a manner that’s incredibly compelling and revolutionary.
Rather than fixating on the bold colors of Gibbons’ original designs, Snyder’s desaturation and grayscale color tones imbue the film with a sense of dread, each major action scene benefiting from stark lighting and shot compositions that feel ripped from a painting rather than a comic book. While controversial, it’s a singularity that Snyder possesses here that allows his version of Watchmen to stand out from Moore’s source material.
THE APEX OF AMBIVALENCE
If the decadent style and subdued color palette of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was a violent swing into the macabre, his grappling of Moore’s themes is where it gets a bit sticky. On one hand, Snyder brilliantly suggests a lived-in world where heroes tarnish the very idea of valiance, but on the other, at times, he completely misses the point of Moore’s biting satire.
Snyder’s core motifs often involve the ideas of godhood, playing with the conflicts over what makes a godlike figure, in fact, celestial. But in Watchmen, rather than eschewing the heroes’ stature, he positions them like deities through his geography of action, visually paralleling them to the very gods he’s skeptical of. In effect, it comes off as entirely indecisive in how it wants to handle Moore’s complex opinions on the place heroes have in this world, so much so that it fails to address them.
MASTERY IN DETACHMENT
As much as Snyder misses the mark thematically on this adaptation, he truly did make history in his treatment of a grounded type of team-up film. Prior to The Avengers or his maligned forming of the Justice League, Watchmen wasn’t the first time anyone had assembled a superhero squad on-screen. However, it was the beginning of doing so in a manner that rivaled blatant optimism and comradery, replacing it with paranoia.
Though this may seem like it aligns with Moore’s themes, it does not, partly because the ethos of Moore’s original societal views is missing in this dynamic. But it doesn’t mean Snyder didn’t find a way to show detachment and coldness in his vision of the Minutemen. The lack of trust, the simmering tension, and an undercurrent of the unspeakable tell us everything we need to know about the characters at play, showing us an inverse of the team-ups we’ve become accustomed to today.
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is one of the most radical takes on comic book texts and will endure that way for decades to come. A template of beautiful visuals and unique framing, Snyder helms a feast for the eyes here that is among his best work cinematically.
What will be debated for years will definitely be Snyder’s divisive viewpoint on the main heroes and their impact on the world they operate within, as his fascination with the paradisiacal cannot quite gel with Moore’s anti-hero ideals. Is that a bad thing? No. Because this very notion of the tortured, grounded superhuman has defined superhero films and television for the last 15 years, for better or worse.
Well, that’s all I got! Stay tuned for tomorrow’s final installment in my Watchmen miniseries, covering Damon Lindelof’s 2019 adaptation.
Peace out!