I watched the extended version, which had more boobs. Overall I liked it. I thought it kept very true to the original. I didn’t mind the ending change too much because people today can’t relate to the cold war tensions of the 80s.
Most if not all of the criticism was valid. Yes one thing that makes Watchmen so great was how well it was crafted. Both sticking to the grid layout and color scheme are two of the easiest to see examples.
Comics and movies are two different art forms. Even in the video they had a sort of enhanced comic in the examples, where the panels moved some. But it is impossible to translate something from one medium to another. Well, I suppose it could be done, but if you make more or less a moving copy, what are you really adding to it?
They animated Batman, the Dark Knight returns and I thought they did a bang up job. While animated films I think can keep the look and feel to a comic easier (They are both drawn and manually colored), the animated film still made some tweaks and the style doesn’t really match the comic at all. Similar but still different.
It’s also worth noting the Nerdwriter look at Snyderisms, which nails some of the issues with Watchmen by way of nailing some of the issues of ALL of Snyder’s flicks.
Watchmen doesn’t do the comic book justice, but the comic book is genius, and Snyder…isn’t… It’s an acceptable re-telling, but in being “pretty okay” it still falls really short.
How does a genetically engineered giant “alien” squid-thing fit into the narrator’s postulate about “real characters in the real world dealing with real issues?” How does a man turned into an omniscient blue god by a physics experiment gone awry?
It’s not “more real,” it just deals with some topics that hadn’t been gotten around to by Peter Parker’s money problems or Tony Stark’s alcoholism or Speedy Harper’s heroin addiction. It’s the exquisite structure that makes Watchmen a singular work, not “whoa, dude, superheroes doing Vietnam atrocities! Superheroes straight up murdering each other!”
