Watchmen Movie Posters

I read Watchmen when I was seventeen years old.  Like most people who have read the seminal graphic novel, Alan Moore’s groundbreaking achievement had a profound effect on my life.  I could easily sit here and sing Watchmen’s praises without much effort.  This is why I wish I never saw the movie.  This isn’t to say that Snyder’s Watchmen wasn’t a perfectly passable movie.  I saw the film with three people who had no prior relationship with Moore’s text and each one liked it just fine.  I’m sure this sentiment will be shared by most people who never had the pleasure of reading the original work.

I didn’t even dislike Snyder’s movie.  I was captivated, waiting to see how he would pull off many of the things that made Watchmen a transcendent comic.  I must say, aside from certain aspects that were clearly “Hollywooded” up, he remained faithful, dropping or altering a few scenes to make the story more palatable for the big screen.

That said, the movie has tainted my experience of reading the original master work.  Alan Moore argued that film is easily digestible.  It fails to challenge viewers by force feeding images and performances down their throat.  Watchmen, the text, worked so well, because you were inclined to insert your own narrative voice.  You had to imagine a six foot tall, walking fluorescent light bulb capable of seeing forward and backward in “time” simultaneously.  You were able to fill in the blanks.  Create your own universe.  Alan Moore just provided the topical decoration.  The AV Club finished its review by saying that “when we look in the sky, we don’t see a bird or a plane…we see a mirror.”  That exemplifies Moore’s text perfectly. We see ourselves in those characters.  We love Rorshach because sometimes, in our darkest moments, we wished to see life in simplistic, contrasting terms.  We understand even respect Manhattan’s continual detachment.  Veidt’s plan, while horrifying in scope and vision, is also not without merit.  Even Laurie transformation from a fatherless, unwilling hero, seems complete and perfectly book ended.

I love Moore’s Watchmen.  So much so, that I love letting myself imagine that possibilities that existed in a world that I will never know or inhabit.  Only the best pieces of art do that.  While I hope that Snyder’s movie does well and receives positive critical press, and I can’t help but hope that people seek out the original work, and experience Watchmen in the medium it was supposed to exist in .  Only then will that proverbial mirror be as polished and revealing as it should be.