Ready to Watch the Watchmen

I am officially getting excited about the Watchmen movie, especially after I saw this “public service announcement” recently:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WsciSNVS0[/youtube]

There are a lot of fans of the graphic novel that are still worried about the film adaptation of their beloved Watchmen falling short of expectations. I’m not one of them, even though I am an enormous fan of the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons masterpiece. Why not? Simply put, there is no possible way for a film, unless it was 10 hours long, to capture all the intricacies and subtleties of the graphic novel, so I don’t expect it to. The Watchmen is incredibly involved… I know some self-professed fans of the graphic novel who claim to have read it many times but were STILL shocked when I pointed out that Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis were homosexual lovers in the backstory. It’s easy to miss some of the more subtle things when reading the books… how can these be expected to make the transition to film?

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it can’t be a great film that does justice to the source material. Look at “The Lord of the Rings“… Peter Jackson changed A LOT of the story from the original Tolkien novels. However his films were great adaptations because he GOT what The Lord of the Rings was all about, and he kept to that vision. He was also smart enough to lift dialogue right from the books and use it in the films, even if he attributed the words to different characters or at different times (example: I believe that Galadriel’s opening words “The world is changed. I feel it in the water… etc.” was spoken by Treebeard in the books). The changes he made created a better MOVIE than a straight retelling of Tolkien’s trilogy could have done. It is called an “adaptation” for a reason. Different medium, different demands.

This little video shows me that Watchmen director Zack Snyder might just “get it” also. Hopefully like Jackson the changes he made to the story that were necessary to make it into a good MOVIE were such that kept to the original vision and preserved the core of what makes the Watchmen graphic novel great.