Sorry for the melo­dra­matic title, but be hon­est, would you have clicked through to this arti­cle had I used a more mea­sured head­line like “10 Well-Reasoned Argu­ments to be Mildly Appre­hen­sive the Watch­men Movie May Not Meet Expectations”?

Con­sider your­self a true admirer of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel Watch­men (1986)? Read on for 10 rea­sons to be very, very afraid. Please note that I haven’t yet seen the movie, and the below rant is all com­ing from the per­spec­tive of some­one that cares about the book. Also be fore­warned that I can’t be both­ered to avoid spoilers.

1. The project has been cursed for years.

Numer­ous direc­tors have come before Zack Sny­der, and all have tried and failed. The rogues’ gallery includes no less than Terry Gilliam, Dar­ren Aronof­sky, and Paul Green­grass, and those are just the ones we know about. It’s too soon in Snyder’s career to issue a ver­dict on him, but it’s fair to say that these three direc­tors are all a fair sight more sea­soned and acclaimed than he. It’s likely that all three (not to men­tion their pro­duc­ers and screen­writ­ers) gave up on Watch­men for very good rea­sons. Gilliam, in par­tic­u­lar, famously had the good sense to agree with Moore that his book may actu­ally be truly unfilmable. And all this is not even to men­tion Warner Bros.’ dra­matic feud with 20^th Cen­tury Fox over the rights to the project itself, even­tu­ally end­ing in Jan­u­ary 2009 with the two rivals begrudg­ingly agree­ing to share the prof­its (while not men­tion­ing that, I also won’t men­tion its fruit­less fling with Para­mount). Read on for still more ani­mos­ity and bad blood swirling about the long-gestating project…

Have no fear! Right-wing, sex­u­ally dam­aged, socio­pathic nutjob Rorschach is on the case

2. It doesn’t have Alan Moore’s blessings.

Worse, it doesn’t have his apa­thy either. Moore didn’t seem too per­turbed by the From Hell (The Holmes Broth­ers, 2001) and League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men (Stephen Nor­ring­ton, 2003) movies. He didn’t col­lab­o­rate on them, nor did he care to even see them. Basi­cally, he shrugged, and trusted his books would live on in their own rights. But the results in every case so far have been dis­as­trous: ter­ri­ble films that retained lit­tle of what made the books mat­ter. In ret­ro­spect, it seems Moore showed extra­or­di­nary patience with the first two films that man­gled his books, and that he now have no mercy for those mess­ing with V for Vendetta and Watch­men makes per­fect sense. Addi­tional legal and eth­i­cal skir­mishes with DC Comics and Warner Bros. over The Wachowski Broth­ers’ and James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2006) led to Moore tak­ing his name off any comics work to which he does not con­trol the copy­right (essen­tially every­thing he did for DC). In the cases of the V for Ven­datta and Watch­men films, he has put his money where his mouth is and offi­cially deferred all of his roy­al­ties to his col­lab­o­ra­tors David Lloyd and Dave Gib­bons. You have to admire the integrity of any­one will­ing to leave that much money on the table. One ray of hope for those that appre­ci­ate the book, how­ever, is that Gib­bons has been actively col­lab­o­rat­ing on the Watch­men pro­duc­tion. Hope­fully his con­tri­bu­tions have helped to keep the film­mak­ers on target.

3. At least one char­ac­ter has been hor­ren­dously miscast.

One of the curses of hav­ing read a book enough times to inter­nal­ize every detail is to also have very clear men­tal images of the char­ac­ters. The Watch­men pro­duc­ers were prob­a­bly right to avoid cast­ing any espe­cially well-known faces. Based on what I’ve seen so far, sev­eral of their choices do feel right to me, espe­cially Patrick Wil­son as Daniel Dreiberg (Nite Owl) Jackie Earle Haley as Wal­ter Kovacs (Rorschach), and Matt Frewer as Moloch. The 30-year-old Malin Aker­man is cer­tainly a very attrac­tive sight onscreen, but her char­ac­ter Lau­rie Jus­peczyk (Silk Spec­tre) is sup­posed to be almost 40 in the novel’s present. I’m giv­ing her the ben­e­fit of the doubt for now, but the real prob­lem is Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt (Ozy­man­dias). Goode is, sim­ply, totally wrong. Veidt should be ridicu­lously hand­some, like George Clooney, but utterly dis­pas­sion­ate and ice-cold, like Keanu Reeves. He should radi­ate intel­li­gence and self-confidence, like Kevin Spacey, and be incred­i­bly fit, like Michael Phelps. But Goode here seems shrimpy, ugly, and weaselly. His mush­mouth dia­logue in pro­mo­tional clips has him affect­ing some kind of botched accent or speech defect. If I were the Watch­men cast­ing agent, I’d Aaron Eckhart’s agent a call.

This scene between Lau­rie and her mom Sally Jupiter (Carla Gug­ino), the orig­i­nal Silk Spec­tre, drops a big hint as to how to mea­sure Laurie’s age (spoiler alert!):

A scene between Veidt and Dan, dur­ing which Goode’s per­for­mance stuns me in its total, absolute wrong­ness for the character:

4. Sny­der has report­edly tarted up the action.

Early reports are that Sny­der has amped up the sex, vio­lence, and action. Read­ers of the book will recall that Silk Spec­tre and Nite Owl come out of retire­ment by effect­ing an aer­ial res­cue from a burn­ing ten­e­ment build­ing. As io9.com rightly notes, Snyder’s ver­sion of the scene sets entirely the wrong tone. The book shows Dan and Lau­rie as old pros that can basi­cally sleep­walk through such a mis­sion, and yet the movie has them out­run­ning fire­balls in slow motion (Snyder’s direc­toral call­ing card). Other early reports are that a rape scene, already hor­rific and shock­ing in the book, has actu­ally been made more tit­il­lat­ing and explicit for the film. Jef­frey Dean Mor­gan (The Come­dian) told MTV News that the scene is “really vio­lent” and the movie is “rated ‘R’ for a reason.”

Thrill as Silk Spec­tre and Nite Owl escape slow-motion fireballs:

5. Snyder’s adap­ta­tion may be too worshipful.

In DeZ Vylenz’ doc­u­men­tary The Mind­scape of Alan Moore, Moore notes the super­fi­cial resem­blance between comics and movie sto­ry­boards. He believes that an under­stand­ing of the mechan­ics of cin­ema can inform comics writ­ing (and vice versa), but if comics writ­ers wor­ship movies too much, their comics will be reduced to “movies that don’t move.” It also works the other way: Sny­der has already proven his skill to lit­er­ally recre­ate comics pan­els into cin­ema with his lurid adap­ta­tion of Frank Miller’s bonkers graphic novel 300 in 2007. Worse, Warner Bros. has pro­duced an atro­cious “motion comics” ver­sion of the orig­i­nal Watch­men graphic novel (avail­able now on iTunes and soon on DVD), com­prised of motion-graphics ani­mated ver­sions of Dave Gib­bons’ art­work, read aloud by a sin­gle voice actor. As Scott McCloud spent an entire book demon­strat­ing (Under­stand­ing Comics, 1993), the way that comics “work” is much more than that: the inter­play of sequen­tial images and (option­ally) words. If Snyder’s movie is sim­i­lar to 300 or the Watch­men Motion Comics, then it might as well just be called Watch­men for Illit­er­ates. We don’t need a mov­ing, talk­ing ver­sion of the book; we can always read the book.

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin inter­views Sny­der and spe­cial effects cre­ator John Des Jardins about their efforts to make an exact­ingly faith­ful adap­ta­tion of the source material:

6. Para­dox­i­cally to the above point, the changes that Sny­der does make may be the wrong ones.

Any­one who’s so much as flipped through the book will real­ize that its com­plex­ity is irre­ducible. I per­son­ally can’t imag­ine what must be sac­ri­ficed to squeeze the essen­tial nar­ra­tive down to a 2 1/2 hour movie, so thank­fully Enter­tain­ment Weekly has com­piled this list. Sny­der has recently admit­ted to cut­ting what I feel to be one of the most heart­break­ing and sem­i­nal sequences in the entire story: the sense­less mur­der of Hol­lis Mason (the Golden Age Nite Owl). Sny­der also hints he has changed the book’s cat­a­clysmic cli­max. I don’t mind los­ing the spe­cific details if screen­writ­ers David Hayter and Alex Tse have devised some­thing suit­able to replace it.

7. One word: “Watchmen”

Sev­eral trail­ers and TV spots released to date include both Rorschach and The Come­dian speak­ing the word “Watch­men.” To any­one that’s read the book, this is an egre­gious sin (almost as bad as say­ing “The Watch­men”). As such, the trail­ers make it seem as if “Watch­men” is the name of some kind of super­group like the Fan­tas­tic Four or The X-Men. True, in the book’s back­story, there was a group of heroes called The Min­ute­men in the 1940s (Moore’s equiv­a­lent to comic’s so-called Golden Age). A sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of heroes gather in the 1970s (includ­ing many of the main char­ac­ters of the book) to dis­cuss forg­ing a new group called The Crime­busters, but they imme­di­ately break up. At no point in the book is the word “Watch­men” ever spo­ken, by any­one. Its only appear­ance in the book is the occa­sional graf­fiti “Who Watches the Watch­men?” in the back­ground of some New York City street scenes. Accord­ing to the all-knowing Wikipedia, the Latin phrase “Quis cus­todiet ipsos cus­todes?” comes from the Roman poet Juve­nal, asked by Plato in the socratic dia­log Repub­lic (380BC-ish). In the con­text of Watch­men, the mean­ing is obvi­ous: the pub­lic is ask­ing of their self-appointed pro­tec­tors, who’s pro­tect­ing us from you? But who’s pro­tect­ing movie­go­ers from film­mak­ers that are dumb­ing down this story?

Here’s a TV spot with both Rorschach and The Come­dian speak­ing the word “Watchmen”:

Here’s the full scene dur­ing which the Come­dian seems to refer to the 1970s group as “Watchmen”:

8. These char­ac­ters are def­i­nitely not “cool.”

Nearly every char­ac­ter in the book is psy­cho­log­i­cally scarred, some deeply so (with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Hol­lis Mason — the orig­i­nal Nite Owl — who comes across as the only one who turned to vig­i­lanteism out of a gen­uine need to help peo­ple). Rorschach is a right-wing sociopath (Watch­men hav­ing been writ­ten in the mid 1980s, think of a cos­tumed Bernard Getz or Charles Bron­son). The Come­dian is a fas­cist and a rapist. Ozy­man­dias is an ego­ma­niac of the most dan­ger­ous sort (think George W. Bush, except infi­nitely worse). Dr. Man­hat­tan is not even human, and unlike the some­what anal­o­gous Super­man, is devoid of emo­tion, empa­thy, or com­pas­sion. New York City was recently host to a Comic-Con con­ven­tion at which more than a few bor­der­line psy­chos left the sanc­tity of their moth­ers’ base­ments to walk around the city dressed up as the sex­u­ally dam­aged, vio­lent nutjob Rorschach. The imagery and clips released from the movie so far only seem to rein­force the per­cep­tion of these char­ac­ters as cool and badass.

9. The mer­chan­dise makes me cringe.

What creep would buy and dis­play a stat­uette of the rapist and fas­cist The Come­dian? Or if you want to rob a bank, you could do worse than don a Rorschach ski mask, about which io9.com has already remarked. Only an Ozy­man­dias action fig­ure [http://www.dccomics.com/dcdirect/?dcd=10047] makes sense in an ironic kind of way, for the char­ac­ter heav­ily mar­keted his super­hero per­sona for per­sonal profit. As for why these tie-in items make me feel queasy, please refer to No. 8 above.

One of the most ironic aspects of the whole Watch­men movie hoopla is now that you can actu­ally own a real Ozy­man­dias action figure

10. And finally, Hol­ly­wood is tak­ing away one of the last remain­ing comic book masterworks.

Warner Bros. Pic­ture Group pres­i­dent Jeff Robi­nov pro­claimed to Enter­tain­ment Weekly his loy­alty to the source mate­r­ial: “The movie is impact­ful, tough, and true to the book that we all loved, and I’m very proud of it.” I’ll try to set aside my imme­di­ate gag reflex at the use of “impact” as an adjec­tive, and hope that he’s right. Hol­ly­wood has already bru­tal­ized Moore’s From Hell, V for Vendetta, and League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men. The books were read by rel­a­tively small num­ber of peo­ple, but the movies were seen by mil­lions who who may never even know the source mate­r­ial exists, let alone read it. Watch­men, like all of Moore’s comics work, was cre­ated for comics. None of the pre­vi­ous adap­ta­tions of his work have sur­vived the adap­ta­tion process, and were mis­in­ter­preted and puréed into milquetoast.

Final Thoughts

Moore and Gibbon’s Watch­men is per­haps the sem­i­nal graphic novel to date. I’m not the first to say it, but Watch­men is the Cit­i­zen Kane of comic books. It’s a tow­er­ing, com­plex, and multi-faceted mas­ter­piece. It has the kind of scope, ambi­tion, and nar­ra­tive exper­i­men­ta­tion that makes it one of the few graphic nov­els that deserves to be called a novel. Time Mag­a­zine rec­og­nized as much by nam­ing it one of its All-Time 100 Nov­els in 2005. Just as it’s incon­ceiv­able that Cit­i­zen Kane be adapted into another medium (the­ater? poetry? inter­pre­tive dance? or for that mat­ter, comics?), so too do I shud­der to imag­ine Watch­men trans­lated into any other form. My biggest fear is that mil­lions of movie­go­ers will expe­ri­ence Watch­men in this incar­na­tion as a big-budget escapist spec­ta­cle, and never be aware of its spe­cial source material.

Most of Moore’s graphic nov­els are exactly that: nov­els. Watch­men, V for Vendetta, Lost Girls, and From Hell are all finite and self-contained. There are no sequels, pre­quels, or spin­offs. Watch­men is being heav­ily mar­keted as another in a long line of super­hero movies, fol­low­ing the mas­sive suc­cess of Iron Man, Bat­man (read The Dork Report review of The Dark Knight), and Spider-Man fran­chises. All of these are open-ended, ongo­ing episodic series that have lasted for decades. How many movie­go­ers will not under­stand that Watch­men is based on an actual novel? Will they antic­i­pate a sequel? Let’s pray that Warner Bros. isn’t plot­ting one, lest Moore really lose his temper.

The Come­dian is no Cap­tain America

Only Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus is more well-regarded, if per­haps less widely read. Watch­men too might have earned such top-shelf gar­lands had it not been set firmly within the his­tor­i­cally juve­nile genre that utterly dom­i­nates West­ern comics to this day: men and women that dress up in tights and fight crime. Super­heroes. They’re for kids, right?

To any­one famil­iar with Moore’s oeu­vre, it’s clear he does gen­uinely love super­heroes despite his repeated attempts to rip them apart. With Watch­men and the even more piti­less Mir­a­cle­man (now trag­i­cally out of print, maybe for­ever), Moore tried to inject a degree of psy­cho­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal real­ism into comics. But gen­er­ally speak­ing, audi­ences (and pub­lish­ers) mostly latched onto the super­fi­cial ele­ments of vio­lence and sex, ush­er­ing in a few decades of super­hero comics that were grim and gritty but lacked depth and imag­i­na­tion. As the comics chased the aging gen­er­a­tion that grew up read­ing Watch­men and its prog­eny, it left kids behind. In 1999, Moore did try to atone for his inad­ver­tent rev­o­lu­tion with a line of comics that attempted to re-inject whimsy, clever sto­ry­telling, and inno­cence back into comics (espe­cially in the Tom Strong and Tomor­row Sto­ries series). But even so, today most acclaimed comics lie out­side the super­hero genre, includ­ing Neil Gaiman’s The Sand­man (fan­tasy, mostly) and Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man (sci­ence fic­tion, mostly).

The Come­dian is dead. Ground floor com­ing up. The jokes just keep coming.

Watch­men is one of my favorite books, and I’ve prob­a­bly read it at least 10 times over the years. So obvi­ously, my love for it feeds into my appre­hen­sion that it may be mis­han­dled. But there have been other much-loved books that I haven’t been espe­cially wor­ried about. Stu­art Gordon’s film based on William Wharton’s novel A Mid­night Clear is an excel­lent (and rare) exam­ple of an exceed­ingly faith­ful adap­ta­tion that works. Also, as much as I loved Cor­mac McCarthy’s novel The Road, I’m quite look­ing for­ward to direc­tor John Hillcoat’s film, as opposed to dread­ing how he might screw it up. Although it should be noted Hill­coat has the excel­lent The Propo­si­tion (2005) on his résumé to com­mend him, while Sny­der only has Dawn of the Dead and 300.

Some prose works have arguably been improved as movies, or at least trans­lated into great works in their own rights. To name a few exam­ples mostly in Watchmen’s arena of science-fiction: Alfonso Cuarón’s Chil­dren of Men (read The Dork Report review) is more grip­ping and vis­ceral than P.D. James’ novel. Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner is some­thing else entirely than Philip K. Dick’s novella Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep. And at the risk of incur­ring the wrath of sword-and-sorcery geeks every­where, I’m pre­pared to argue that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films improve enor­mously upon J.R.R. Tolkien’s insuf­fer­ably tedious books. Oh yeah, I said it. Bring it on.

So why am I so appre­hen­sive about Watch­men in par­tic­u­lar? Because it has been his­tor­i­cally mis­un­der­stood and mis­in­ter­preted for 20 years and I see no sign that Sny­der is see­ing any deeper than its sur­face. If Moore’s Watch­men tried but failed to per­ma­nently revi­tal­ize the super­hero genre by lay­ing bare its inter­nal luna­cies, what is Snyder’s movie try­ing to accom­plish, and will it too fail?

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Offi­cial movie site: watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com

Must read: Why I will not be see­ing Watch­men by Kevin Church

Must read: Spoiler Alert: WATCHMEN is Fuck­ing Awe­some by über-geek (that’s a com­pli­ment) Wil Wheaton

Must read: What Hap­pens if Watch­men Flops? by Graeme McMillan

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