Adapting Watchmen after 9/11

Every generation has its own reasons for destroying New York.

—Max Page, The City's End¹

Released in March 2009, Zack Snyder's film version of Watchmen was a very ambitious experiment in hyperfaithful cinematic adaptation. Taking its source, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's 1987 graphic novel, as script, storyboard, and design bible, the production vowed it would treat the famously complicated narrative "like an illuminated text, like it was written 2,000 years ago."² And for the most part, that's precisely what the movie did, marshaling the many resources of digital blockbuster cinema to reproduce as closely as possible scenes, settings, costumes, even specific shots as laid out in the graphic novel's panels.

Snyder, whose 2006 adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's graphic novel 300 (1998) had marked him as something of an auteur in the translation of other authors' works, took on Watchmen with the stipulation that he would keep the story's original setting, letting the book guide production down to the last detail. The mission of the production thus became mimesis, an increasingly common approach in the era of previsualization, digital backlots, and performance capture that has produced, alongside Snyder's own 300, films such as The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004) and Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2005). Such filmic adaptations are stylish and uncanny hybrids, poised somewhere between live action and animation, printed page and filmed frame, cult object and mainstream commodity.³

In one crucial respect, however, the film of Watchmen diverges from the book. In the original ending scripted by Moore and drawn by Gibbons, millions of New York City residents die in an attack that is bizarre even by comic-book standards: with a blinding flash, a gigantic squidlike creature appears in Times Square, dying on arrival but releasing a "psychic shockwave" that rips through the city, killing half its population; this is the culmination of a plot to frighten the world's superpowers into unification against a common enemy. In the movie, the attack no longer centers on New York. Instead, cities around the world are struck by spherical explosions of blue light that disintegrate buildings and leave smoking craters. As for the squid creature, it is simply gone: excised by a screenwriter's pen, omitted from the meticulous preproduction artwork, and unmentioned in the making-of texts surrounding the film's release, save for occasional references to Snyder's "reimagined ending."

As Sara J. Van Ness observes, "Squidgate" sparked a major controversy among fans, for whom tampering with the 1987 source marked a breach of trust all too common in Hollywood's treatment of material cherished by subcultures.⁴ In response, Snyder defended the new ending as an elegant solution to the problem of having too much material to include in a two-and-a-half-hour movie, pointing out that to retain the squid and its numerous subplots would mean cutting other elements of the book, as well as creating an unworkably long film. For their part, the movie's screenwriters emphasized the need to update the climax for a wider audience whose lack of familiarity with the graphic novel would make it hard to accept a giant teleporting squid as the metaphorical equivalent of nuclear Armageddon.

Reasonable as these explanations were, they failed to address an obvious question: how did the filmmakers' willingness to alter something central to the book's identity—its ending—square with the absolute fidelity they lavished on the rest of the adaptation? While the squid creature was dropped from development efforts as early as 1989, there is no overriding reason Snyder couldn't have reinstated it, given his decision to emulate the rest of the source material so exactly. His embrace of the altered ending, breaking his loyalty oath to the source material, can be read most coldly as a slippage along the economic fault line faced by any cult object transformed into a blockbuster: how do you compromise between small but fervent fan audiences and mainstream appeal? But the altered ending can also be read as a response, if a deflected...