Saw Watchmen Last Night…

I walked into the theater last night with absolutely no expectations whatsoever out of Zack Snyder’s filmic adaptation.  And my interests in David Hayter (the primary screenwriter) only extend to his voicework as Snake for Metal Gear Solid.  I felt this way for a few reasons.

1. I’m not the kind of person to be upset when a film deviates from its source material.  Arguments at The Hog’s Head have often focused on the differences between film and textual versions of Harry Potter.  Even for books as widely read as those, I can accept big discrepancies when they jump from the page to the screen.  Consequently, I never walk into a film adaptation with a checklist of things that it “must have” in order to be an adequate treatment.
2. I knew that translating Watchmen to a film would require some marked changes.  For one thing, some details in the book are very grounded in comic conventions and specific historical contexts.  Between differences in the medium and differences in the 23 years that have passed, some things from that novel just wouldn’t play well with an audience today.  And, the complexity of the book cannot be fully accounted for in any cinematic treatment — especially the complicated narrative structure.  Factor in that Warner Bros. tagged this as a big-budget, major movie release and sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into it, some of it had to be mainstreamed enough to draw a wide audience.  I’m sure Warners is hoping to least break even in the first month of release — I can’t imagine the film will stick around in theaters much beyond that.
3. Having seen 300, I had an idea of where Snyder would go in terms of style.  I’ll open up one point now and tackle it in depth later:  Snyder can stage and direct an action film.  But, as 300 demonstrated, story and character are sometimes left thin in favor of artfully staged gore and sex.  This made me skeptical of his ability to take a character-driven story like Watchmen in a good direction.