Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
March 10, 2009
The Latin, of course, translates to “Now we shall talk about Watchmen”, which I saw the other night. To be honest, I didn’t really think it was filmable. Or more precisely, I thought it was filmable, but not in a way that would be terribly accessible to the casual moviegoer, which would nix its chances of getting a decent budget from a major studio. I was not alone in this opinion either – it seems that Terry Gilliam, once attached to direct, said the same thing, and Alan Moore, who wrote the thing, concurred.
We were all wrong, as it turns out. By backing off just a tiny bit from the more difficult aspects of the film, or glossing over/streamlining just a couple of the more unwieldy elements, the film preserved as much of the original’s virtues as can be expected from any cross-media adaptation. Like the Lord of the Rings movies before it, it took a beloved piece from a different medium and adapted it at a standard which met the high expectations of a die-hard fanbase. If one is new to the whole Watchmen phenomenon, I would recommend reading the graphic novel first, because it is still better, but then, by all means, go see the movie. It stands with Sin City as the shining example of how to adapt comics to the big screen.
