Watching the watchmen

Spoilers

Having watched Watchmen some time ago, the review I criticized in an earlier post seems even more misplaced now than it seemed at that time. Anyway I don't like the movie, which means less than nothing considering I didn't like Godfather or 2001: A Space Odyssey for that matter. I have some standard to maintain after all. Now it has something to do with the fact that I haven't read Watchmen the graphic novel by Alan Moore, which is held by many comics aficionados to be a ground breaking work of  its genre.However it is generally understood that any adaptation has to strike a balance between appealing to the following of original work by staying true to it and bringing in audience not introduced with the work. While Zack Snyder is faithfully to the novel he fails to hold the attention of larger audience,  which in my view irrevocably dooms this thinking man's superhero movie.

First of movie's short coming is Snyder slavish adherence to the text while failing to capture of the essence of the novel. Reminiscent of his earlier adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, he copies almost the novel panel by panel. However in doing that he fails to effectively capture the dystopian  theme of  the novel, the story of watchmen being secondary and in effect enforcing this narrative. Instead the movie is slow and feels dragging on forever. Even the visuals disappoint, failing to impart a gritty, noirish feel, done admirably in dark knight for instance.

However for me the main shortcoming is the novel itself. The novel written during the tense period of cold war is itself outdated having US as the clear winner. This is however least of its problems.

The novel for most part is nothing but a parade of American liberal cliches and bogeymen. The novels depicts Nixon as President having abrogated the term limits, and it is implied, subverted the institutions, effectively dictator of US.

Now it is not my case that Nixon was a honorable man, for he was not, but as cynical as it may sound, his greatest crime was not Watergate but hostility to  media, resulting from fear psychosis. Watergate while not exactly something which will commend Nixon to posterity, was hardly a deviation as far as political skulduggery is concerned, similar practices being regularly employed from Johnson administration going as far as back to FDR.

 Similarly Nixon didn't harbor any ambition of abrogating term limits and anointed Caesar, that dishonor ironically belongs to liberal Messiah predating the current Messiah, FDR, ironically it was only due to his breaking the convention of two terms that term limits were introduced.

To add to this, it is implied that JFK's assassination was a government's conspiracy, the right wing elements within the government being the perpeterators. Of course the inconvenient truth is that JFK was felled, as Jackie Kennedy frustratingly remarked, by a silly little communist.

Most infuriating however is the moral ambivalence. US for all its flaws has been a force for good in contrast to  Communist regimes which have perpetrated immeasurable misery and death. It is clear for all its self righteousness, left uses liberty in much the same sense as it uses fascism.