Has Zack Snyder managed to one-up Peter Jackson?
Watchmen, the adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel set in a parallel Earth in 1985, where superheroes are prohibited from using their powers despite the threat of nuclear war, is now available on DVD. If you missed having the big screen experience, now you can enjoy it at home.
The San Francisco Chronicle had the little man jumping out of the chair for this film. Reviewer Mick LaSalle spoke glowingly about director Zack Snyder, saying:
Other directors shake the camera to instill excitement. Snyder meticulously choreographs action scenes and thrills audiences with his inventiveness. Other directors go in for brutal realism. Snyder goes in for brutal surrealism, adding little visual grace notes that comment on the action and allow for audience distance. These touches, some of them genuinely odd but strangely right, show an unconscious engagement with the material, the work of a director not going through the motions but pulling from all sides of his brain.
Our own Filminator called Watchmen the movie “a triumph across all dimensions. Pacing, cinematography, dialogue, acting, casting, set design, atmosphere, editing. This movie literally had no flaws. Not everyone will love it; one might prefer a Cabernet, but Watchmen is nonetheless a perfect Pinot Noir.”
In his review, he also wrote:
“Not only is Watchmen an enormously well done and entertaining movie, but it’s a shining accomplishment to the somewhat novel concept that you can indeed make a great movie from great source material, being true to both and sacrificing neither. How many of us have cringed to see our favorite books massacred in the translation to film, the original achievement sacrificed not to the needs of the film medium, but to the egos of the film industry’s prima donnas?
Peter Jackson with The Lord of the Rings proved you could do a film worthy of even the hardest great book, but even he was forced to make some substantial changes, that while effective, were still different. Zack Snyder has one-upped him. He has proven that sometimes the original material is already the best material, and the best movie can only be made by staying true to the book.”
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