In spite of how marvelous Man of Steel was and is, Zack Snyder’s masterpiece is still 2009’s Watchmen. In typical Snyder fashion, it divided audiences. Some found it to be the most perfect adaptation of the Alan Moore comic imaginable; others cited it as proof that the material was inherently unsuited to film. As far as I’m concerned, the movie can wear its mixed reactions as a badge of honor, a testament to the specificity with which it approached its material, keeping true to its intentions and its earnest attempts to effectively adapt a story that is immense and challenging to begin with.
One of the wonders of witnessing a movie that is deemed by many to be unfilmable is that when it is done successfully, you get to see something that has never been done before on film. Put another way, the nature of works considered unfilmable require filmmakers to come up with innovative and unprecedented ways of screen storytelling simply in order to capture the essence of something that people think can’t be translated into a movie. It’s a challenge, and what’s remarkable about this feat is that the people who have the boldness to take on a challenge that is defined by its impossibility is that they also have the brashness and sensibility to actually pull it off. Watchmen is such a vast story that cramming it even into three hours while capturing so many of its elements is an accomplishment. And cranking out action that feels entirely novel yet eerily familiar to its comic source, like pages come to life, while harnessing a tone that remains consistent yet changes based on which character the story is focusing on at the moment, all while carrying out the original deconstruction of a genre, mixing in contemporary satire with the original political elements—it’s frankly incredible to behold.
Zack Snyder’s movies are meant to reward the open-minded, people who are looking for work that takes them to worlds they’ve never encountered before, reaching heights that they never even knew existed. His recent movies have shown a progression that fulfills the promise he exhibited in his earlier work, and all signs indicate that his original vision and sense for novel ways of storytelling are not going to let up any time soon.
