Why The Watchmen Graphic Novel Was Better Than The Film

Like most comic fans, one of my favorite graphic novels is Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I would assert that Watchmen is not only the greatest graphic novel, but one of the greatest novels of all time, easily the best written during my lifetime. So when I heard that it was being adapted into a film by Zack Snyder, I was understandable excited. Snyder was (at least before Watchmen) one of my favorite directors, after the excellent 300 and respectable Dawn of the Dead. However, when I sat down on midnight of March 6, 2009 and watched the film, I left feeling disappointed.

The book, as far as I’m concerned, was pretty perfect, so why change what works? For example, they completely messed up the character design! Everyone was wearing those weird latexy costumes that have been so popular in superhero movies lately. Also, and it may surprise you that I noticed this, they made Dr. Manhattan’s penis too big. In the comic, it was a modest, Michelangelo’s David-sized penis. It was rendered simply with two curved lines, one representing the penis and the other, the scrotum. In the film, Manhattan’s penis is a hulking goliath, swinging wildly in front of his also-lengthy testicles.

An incredibly important element in Watchmen is that of the history of the fictional world. I found myself wondering “Why?” about some of Snyder’s choices for the flashback scenes. In the flashback of the attempted forming of the Watchmen by Veidt, I was completely preoccupied by Dr. Manhattan’s costume with respect to the established size of his penis in a previous scene. In this scene, he wears a unitard, and the bulge in his crotch is completely inconsistent with the size of Manhattan’s enormous penis in the scene earlier where we initially meet his penis. This was completely distracting. In contrast, Moore’s flashbacks brilliantly interweave with and never contradict the narrative set in the present. And Manhattan’s penis is a reasonable size.

I’m not alone in my last gripe, you’ll hear a lot of comics fans complaining about this one. The ending. It was completely changed from the graphic novel! It almost seems like Snyder misses the point. When Manhattan shows up in the destroyed ruins of New York, his penis is mammoth! Are we to believe that this is what the penis of a man standing naked in New York City would look like? I doubt it. What I remember most vividly about this scene was that the length of Dr. Manhattan’s penis easily eclipsed the length of his testicles. Something which the sharp-eyed fan will tell you never happened in the graphic novel.

Some books just can’t be adapted, and I would count Watchmen among them. I only wish that Snyder’s take had at least been passable.