Zack Snyder’s epic adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel is one of the most reverent and ambitious comic-book films ever made. The director’s attention to meticulously capturing the finest details from the comic make watching Watchmen a markedly unique experience. Perhaps more than any other superhero film, Watchmen feels like a stylish graphic novel playing out on the big screen.
Snyder transfers the comic’s bleak, uncompromising tone and tricky political agenda while never forgetting that Watchmen is made to entertain. The complex philosophical questions that the film poses are almost as disturbing as the answers that it provides, but that’s part of what makes it such a compelling work. A brilliant cast, led by Jackie Earle Haley’s mesmerizing Rorschach and Billy Crudup’s transformative portrayal of the all-mighty Dr. Manhattan, makes the film’s intricate narrative structure (which spans 45 years and is set mostly during an alt-history Cold War) more palatable.
Watchmen was ill-received by some precisely because of why I love it so much: because it doesn’t assume that it knows better than its source material. Snyder’s near-religious devotion to the graphic novel allows his film to succeed as a magnificent, sprawling adaptation of one of the most important literary works of the 20th Century.