Zack Snyder: Watchmen (2009)

Unfilmable. Unadaptable. A quixotic and unnecessary undertaking. This sums up what was long the prevailing attitude toward adapting Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark 1986-87 comic book miniseries. Many filmmakers had been attached and failed to turn the sprawling and intricate superhero satire into a film of conventional length, among them Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass, but for various reasons the project never materialized. Their failure seemed to confirm the impossibility of filming Watchmen.

Then, hot off the success of 300, Warner Bros. approached Zack Snyder with the task of turning Watchmen into a film. Now more than a decade after the film’s 2009 release, with the subsequent ascendance of the superhero genre to the mainstay of Hollywood tentpole filmmaking, and with the acclaim of the recent HBO Watchmen sequel miniseries (as yet, unseen in full by me), it’s perhaps hard to remember how futile adapting Watchmen had seemed. Moore and Gibbons' story imagines an alternate history of the twentieth century, where the emergence of superheroes (the term I’ll use to describe the various costumed crime fighters of the film’s world, despite the fact that only one of them has any actual superhuman powers) has altered the trajectory of major world events. With an eye to illuminating some of the internal contradictions of superhero lore, Moore and Gibbons portrayed superheroes, whom in the popular imagination were seen as simplistic and childish figures, with complexity and moral ambiguity. Would Snyder be up to the task of making Watchmen into a successful film?

Re-watching Watchmen in 2021 confirms for me that Snyder’s film is one of the most fascinating and well-realized superhero films ever made. Visually stunning and provocative, Watchmen is curiously situated in recent film history, given the explosion of superhero films in the 2010s with Marvel’s MCU, and considering the trajectory of Snyder’s own subsequent career as a superhero filmmaker and his continued treatment of similar themes. Assessed as both a film and as an adaptation of Moore and Gibbons’ series, fans of the book have called Watchmen too literal-minded in its obsession with re-creating visual aspects of the book or plot, while bemoaning that Snyder misses the point of Moore and Gibbons’ work. But I think this response is wrong on a number of levels, both in terms of its understanding of adaptation and as an evaluation of Snyder’s film. The questions that intrigue me are what works about Watchmen as a film, and what does it say about the superhero genre more generally and Snyder’s take on it?

Remarkably, Sndyer manages to successfully translate much of the visual style of the graphic novel to the cinematic medium, by working the material as a response to the dominant conventions of the then still-emerging superhero film genre. It’s worth looking in depth at some of Snyder’s directorial choices, which may go some way to explaining why the film has  generated some visceral reactions that corresponding scenes in the comic book series don’t. It is nothing short of an accomplishment that the film manages to include so many of the twelve-issue comic book series’ bracing juxtapositions of superheroes with socio-political topics. In the just-over-three hour runtime of the Director’s Cut (Snyder’s preferred cut of the film, which includes 24 minutes of footage not in the theatrical release, but does not integrate the animated adaptation of Tales of the Black Freighter) the film touches on the role of violence in relation to sexual excitement, the war on crime, twentieth century anti-Communism, and the spectre of nuclear holocaust.

As in the opening pages of the comic book miniseries, Snyder’s film begins with the murder of Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), also known as the costumed vigilante The Comedian. In the opening scene, the aging but still muscular Blake is attacked in his penthouse apartment by a masked assailant while watching a news program featuring discussion of fourth-term President Richard M. Nixon’s robust defense of US hegemony: “Let it be clear, we maintain our strength in order to maintain peace.” As the apocalyptic threat of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is debated, the television is switched to a perfume commercial, for Adrian Veidt’s AKA Ozymandias’s (Matthew Goode) newest fragrance, featuring Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” As Blake settles in with a cigar and scotch, the door is burst in and King Cole’s swelling ballad scores a brutal fight between Blake and his assailant, before Blake is sent through the plate-glass window to the sidewalk many stories below. 

As the blood streaks Blake’s happy face pin that serves as the Comedian’s logo, mirroring the hands of the Doomsday Clock that ticks ever closer to nuclear Armageddon, (and which is itself the most recognizable icon of the comic book series), cue the opening credits: and what opening credits! While Snyder didn’t have the luxury of including the backstory and supplementary textual material that Moore and Gibbons include in the back pages of each of Watchmen’s twelve issues, Snyder makes use of montage and slow-motion tableau as the opening credits of the film offer a crash course in worldbuilding, recreating key moments in the backstory, and revealing to the viewers how the events of the twentieth century were shaped by superheroes. 

Scored to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” we witness the formation of the original superhero group, the Minutemen, their rise and fall, and the creation of a subsequent group in the 1960s, the Watchmen (known as the Crimebusters in Moore and Gibbons’ comic). Among other recontexualized events from American history, we see a pinup image of Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) on the Enola Gay as it drops the atomic bomb on Japan, Comedian as the second gunman on the grassy knoll who assassinates JFK, and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) accompanying Apollo 11 to the moon (his blue glow reflected in Neil Armstrong’s visor). It’s a spine-tingling work of alternate history, but it also lays the groundwork for some of the story’s key background exposition, from the role of superheroes in US foriegn policy and Nixon’s repeal of term limits, to the Keene Act, which ultimately bans costumed heroes from operating outside of government jurisdiction. Given the daunting work of setting up the complex background that is at once familiar and yet strange, the opening credits of Watchmen are one of the greatest examples in recent cinema, and when considering the wonderful credits sequence in Dawn of the Dead, establishes Snyder as especially creative in using them to forward storytelling. (Interestingly, Snyder returns to the use of tableau in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to establish his version of Batman and Superman in that film, even casting Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Thomas Wayne.)

The credits play a key role in establishing the tone and themes of the story, because the relationship of the superheroes in Watchmen to the real-world is one of the primary ways that the film maintains the bracing critique of Moore and Gibbons’ work: if superheroes were real, what impact would they have? What does the impulse of grown adults to dress up in costumes and mete out vigilante violence tell us about the role of fantasy and desire in relation to justice? How does that fantasy underpin certain ideas that America, and Western nations more broadly, have of their own role in the world? 

While I have grown to love the comic book miniseries Watchman deeply, for a long time I admired it more than I loved it, or even really “got” its central critique of superheroes as both psychoanalytic projections and ideological figures. In part, this was because I had so much fondness for superheroes and comic books, I found it difficult to accept or even admit some of the truths that Watchmen suggests about them. On the flip side, it’s easy to want to move to a wholesale dismissal of superheroes, seeing them as nothing but fascistic power fantasies. But repeated readings of the comic book series confirms for me that there is a deep love of the characters and their genre tropes in the book, even as it offers bracing critique. There’s a real ambivalence at the heart of the text, something that is mirrored in Sally Jupiter’s feelings toward the sadistic abuser, Edward Blake. We often want moral clarity, permission to either cheer on or reject people who have done awful, awful things. But Moore and Gibbons don’t give it to us.

I think that this is where some of the people who claim to love the graphic novel, but dislike Zack Snyder’s film, or claim it distorts the meaning of the comic are missing one of the key elements of the film, and how Snyder’s vivid and violent pop filmmaking fits into it: why are we so disturbed by these scenes of violence in Watchmen, when so much of the underlying psychology of our collective culture and entertainment contains brutality and sadism no less disturbing? How can we justify and paper over the thrill of violence in most superhero films, where the laws of physics are bent to avoid bloodshed, and the moral legitimacy of force is taken as a given? Perhaps an attitude of condescension towards comic books legitimated Moore and Gibbons’ critique of superheroes in the eyes of many, but I don’t think that Moore and Gibbons’ were dismissive of comic books’ power. If so, of course “funny books” for kids are morally suspect for the oblique inclusion of such material. But, we are so accustomed to “adult” storytelling trading in cheap sex and violence, that people often don’t recognize the double standard.

In order to unpack this idea a bit more, I want to focus for a moment on Edward Blake’s Comedian, whose murder prompts the neo-noir investigation that frames the search for his killer and acts as the narrative throughline of both the film and comic. At the same time it’s worth noting how his brutality and seemingly-cynical philosophy acts as a thematic lynchpin for thinking about the role of superheroes in society. Blake is, on the surface, the ultimate cynic. The one hero who bridges both the 1940s Minutemen and the later Watchmen, he is also the only hero besides Dr. Manhattan who continues to operate under government oversight as a kind of special ops assassin. Blake is violent and seemingly amoral. For example, I mentioned above his role in the JFK assassination. Blake seems to revel in the violence he deals out, whether it’s against Nazis and bank robbers, or later suppressing Communists and domestic anti-government protests.

In one of the film’s most viceraly disturbing scenes he attempts to rape Sally Jupiter at one of the Minutemen’s meetings. The scene is shot like an action scene, complete with Snyder’s use of elaborate fight staging and speed ramping. The formal treatment demonstrates the similarity between this kind of repulsive brutality and much of the content of contemporary action-cinema, in a way that I think is instructive for the viewer. It cements the relationship that both the film and book attempt to make between superhero violence and the role of violence in awakening certain kinds of sexual excitement (consider Sally’s pinup girl costumes in the 1940s, or, in the film especially, the associations of the dominatrix leathers Laurie [Malin Ackermen] wears as Silk Spectre II). In filming it the way he does, Snyder implicitly makes a connection to the way that violence is just part and parcel of our mainstream cinematic diet. Appropriately, the sexual nature of the violence draws an added level of moral outrage in the viewer, but in different contexts how many superficially similar scenes are cheered on, such as the the scene in 2012’s The Avengers, when Black Widow is tied up and threatened by a group of villains, only for it to be revealed as a lure for the enemies. The lack of real danger doesn’t eliminate the fact that the threat of Black Widow’s assault serves as a pretext for cinematic violence.

Some might say that it’s not entirely clear whether Snyder even understands the connection I’m making, but I would counter that it’s irrelevant since I don’t believe that the intent of the creator defines how this should be read. Imagine this scene shot in a “serious” manner reminiscent of how most filmic entertainment today shoots sexual violence, as in recent prestige television shows such as Lovecraft Country that featured the sexual trauma of a Korean woman as the main hook for an entire episode. In such shows, the seriousness is meant to demonstrate the “maturity” of the content, or, as has been rightly noted as a trope, to lend female characters “complexity” through trauma. Snyder’s use of genre and action film conventions, such as slow motion and choreographed action, links the possibility of critique to the formal presentation of the story. To film the scene elsewise would be to undo the implicit critique of the way that we consume sexually violent imagery that Moore and Gibbons’ comic made.

It’s also significant that the Comedian breaks down when he realizes the scope of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias’s plan; at that point Blake realizes the futility of all the violence he meted out, and the utter pretence of the idea of righteous violence. Ultimately, the progressive vision that Adrian hopes to carry out, building a world of peace, is also reliant on mass-scale violence, suffering, and the deaths of innocents.

Violence in Watchmen is simultaneously thrilling on the surface, while it confronts the viewer with the moral question of whether it is ever justified. In one key flashback sequence, Dan Dreiberg AKA Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) finds himself fighting alongside the Comedian, trying to counter anti-superhero protests during the police strike that leads to the institution of the Keene Act. Comedian fires rubber bullets and tear gas indiscriminately into the crowd, as Nite Owl protests feeling supremely uncomfortable with the whole violent situation: “What’s happened to America? What’s happened to the American Dream?” Comedian replies, “It came true!” Comedian sees the revolutionary violence of the crowd as being the very thing that America was built on, and therefore he also doesn’t see the vigilante violence of the superheroes as any kind of devolution, but residing at the core of the American fantasy of righteous violence. With superheroes, as is very clear in Snyder’s film, the brutality, and the strange love for it by the audience and characters, is put front and centre. You can’t disavow it the way we can with so many superhero stories.

The relationship between violence and the establishment and maintenance of order is best exemplified in Watchmen in the character of Walter Kovacs AKA Rorschach, played by Jackie Earle Haley, the one character who holds himself to a strict Manichean view of good and evil, in which the righteousness of violent retribution is unquestioningly clear as part of the punishing of evil doers. Rorschach holds to a child-like fantasy, rooted in his own traumas, of being able to distinguish between his own brutal retribution and the grotesque crimes of his victims. Rorschach is only able to maintain this clear black and white vision because he has been pushed over the edge by the brutality of his childhood as the son of a prostitute and immense poverty. In some ways Rorschach is like an even more extreme version of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, looking to punish individual examples of social decay, for example killing a pedophile out of righteous anger, much as Travis ultimately kills Harvey Keitel’s pimp. In some ways Rorschach is as much a casualty of society as anyone, searching for meaning in his use of violence.

Rorschach also lends the film its noir anti-hero among anti-heroes. If I haven’t expanded much on the plot of the film, it’s because like a good noir, it’s somewhat incidental. Snyder layers revelation upon revelation, with flashbacks to the past filling in information for the viewer to understand the relations between characters. But like a noir, the deeper we get into the investigation, the less the answer often matters. The screenplay, by David Hayter and Alex Tse, does a good job of condensing the sprawling story without losing any of the key information. In Snyder’s Director’s Cut scenes are able to breathe more than in the theatrical version, adding more contextual background to the characters.

I would argue that this ability to develop and present the stories of so many characters is one of the film’s biggest strengths. It deals in individual sequences that work almost like short stories, while coalescing into a whole where the emotional effect is cumulative. Take for example, one of the film’s standout sequences: the origin story of Dr. Manhattan, which follows fairly closely on the sequence of events in Book IV of the comic book series, “Watchmaker.” In a roughly 10 minute sequence, the film shows how Jon Osterman became Dr. Manhattan, and contextualizes him within both the Cold War and his own growing distance from those he loves. Dr. Manhattan is ultimately a tragic figure, his growing power makes him less and less able to comprehend ordinary human emotions and values, but at the same time his focus on issues of cosmic importance is what allows him to miss out on both the lives of those around him, his colleagues and lovers, but also Adrian Veidt’s plot. The whole scene is scored to the music of Philip Glass from the soundtrack to the film Koyaanisqatsi, the 1982 documentary on “Life out of Balance,” famous for its time lapse photography and “God’s eye” view of natural and urban environments. The minimalist Glass score reflects the omnipotent view that Dr. Manhattan takes.

In a key change to the story’s climax, the film substitutes Dr. Manhattan as the object that will unite the Soviet Union and US together in Adrian Veidt’s plot, rather than the faux “alien” giant squid monster. It is one change that some fans decry, and on initial viewing I didn’t love either. But once one realizes that the “squid” is, as Moore himself has stated in interviews, a “MacGuffin” that allows him to explore other aspects of superheroes and the ability of great powers to manipulate human beings to higher purposes, it actually makes sense to streamline the film. It makes Dr. Manhattan more central to the plot in a way that works for a three hour film, rather than the way that a 12-issue comic book series has the time to integrate its various plot threads.

But plot and much of the film’s dialogue is taken directly from the comic book series, while it is Snyder’s sense of visual style that allows him to translate the comic book images from Gibbons’ art to the cinematic medium, even if, as with 300, he often takes the comic book page as a storyboard. Snyder finds wonderful cinematic allusions, from the 80s chic of Adrian Veidt’s office tower (straight out of American Psycho) to Nixon and Kissenger appearing in the war room straight out of Dr. Strangelove to the way that Nite Owl and Ozymandias’s rubber suits pay reference to the rubber nipples of Joel Schumacher’s Batman films—and with its queer aesthetic, makes Adrian Veidt totally at home at Studio 54 (as he’s shown in the opening credits). In fact, Snyder on more than one occasion, aligns the superheroes with queer culture and disco. The anti-superhero riots bare more than a passing resemblance to the 1979 “Disco Demolition Night” riots, when baseball fans in Chicago stormed the field and took out their anger on a pile of disco records, which in turn could be seen as rooted in anti-queer and anti-Black attitudes among disco haters. Ozymandias is aligned with progressive elements in American culture, even though as technocrat, he chooses to bring to fruition his vision of the American Dream as a benevolent hegemony founded on a violent lie.

In this way it’s worth thinking about the role that irony and satire play in the film, since Snyder is, if anything, an immensely earnest filmmaker. He takes things seriously, and he loves the images and characters he puts up on the screen, filming them with a loving gaze. His use of slow motion might be seen as another way to extend and dwell up on the images he creates. Likewise, in his use of music in the film, one of the things that critics have commented on is the obviousness of many of the tracks of twentieth century pop that underlie certain scenes, from “The Sound of Silence” during Blake’s funeral to the infamous use of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during the Nite Owl and Silk Spectre sex scene. What it draws attention to is the way that musical choices become as much a play into pop iconography as the film references, forcing us to consider the way that music functions in film, and one of the main differences from the comic book page, which cannot use music audibly. Arguably, it would be much more cynical for Snyder to show off his deep musical knowledge with obscure cuts.

Snyder’s relatively straightforward approach to the material serves Watchmen well for the most part. The story of Watchmen can be described as a kind of satire, but it’s also a deeply serious satire. It’s not a comedy. While satire is meant to hold up the shortcomings of some elements of society for criticism, it is often accompanied with a great deal of irony, where something is presented as good that the attuned viewer is invited to see critically. Some of the criticisms of the film suggest that because Snyder seems to lack irony, that the film must thereby endorse everything it portrays. But I think that playing it “straight” is key to the film’s success. It lends Snyder’s Watchmen a “camp” quality, which is attributable to the earnestness of the presentation. As Susan Sontag, in her famous “Notes on Camp'' essay explains, pure camp is always naive. It isn’t intentional. It is, as she says, “art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”

To be too “knowing and winking,” in other words, to position oneself, either director or viewer, as superior to the work, would be to fail to miss the very object of the satire, which is the way that these stories, as troubling as some of the aspects of superheroes they reveal may be, show a real appetite for violence and sex, offering a cover for imperialism and more. To take an already ironic, above it all, position would be to suggest that the viewer or director is not implicated in it, rather than show that as consumers of other superhero movies and fiction we are deeply embedded in it. The satire of Watchmen depends on taking it all very seriously.

When Alan Moore first approached DC comics with the ideas that would become Watchmen, he wanted to use the recently acquired characters from Charlton Comics, including Blue Beetle, Peacemaker, and Captain Atom. He felt that the impact of the story would be greater if he used existing heroes, but DC executives convinced him that using close analogues would work just as well. Arguably, that was the correct choice, especially in terms of his realization of Dr. Manhattan. 

In comparison, it’s interesting that Zack Snyder would make Watchmen as his first superhero film before turning to the established DC heroes, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. It’s not hard to see how Snyder explores some similar themes as in Watchmen in a film like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, from the toll that violence takes on heroes, to the idea of using Superman as a kind of Dr. Manhattan figure of fear and awe, extended from his presentation in Man of Steel as well. In a sense, Snyder was granted the permission to do what Moore always dreamed of doing, drawing on the deep attachments that people have built up to Batman and Superman in his story, but then exploring them as both satirical analogues simultaneously as he deals with their status as iconic heroes themselves.

That’s what makes his Watchmen all the more impressive. He manages to make these characters feel fully realized and draws us into the stakes and excitement of their world, all while forwarding a coherent critique of the violent impulses that superheroes reveal in us.

The epigraph of Moore and Gibbons’ comic book series is the famous quote from Juvenal’s Satires that gives the book its name: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” or “Who watches the watchmen?” Moore draws his social critique very specifically by adding that this line was also “Quoted as the epigraph of the Tower Commission Report, 1987,” thus, drawing a clear link between his satire of unrestrained power and the abuses of the Iran-Contra affair the Tower Commission investigated. Watchmen isn’t content with just blaming the ills of society on superheroes. To read it as such would simply be to retread Dr. Frederic Wertham’s 1954 anti-comic book polemic, Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comic books were a pernicious influence on the youth of America. The success of this film is that, like Moore and Gibbons’ comic book series, it takes superheroes seriously and in that, rather than seeing them as inherently ridiculous, reveals the complexity and fascination they provide for us. For it is us who ultimately watch the watchmen. What responsibility do we watchers bear?

9 out of 10

Watchmen (2009, USA)

Directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on Watchmen by Dave Gibbons (and Alan Moore [uncredited by request]); starring Malin Ackerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson.

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