Straight from the Page

There's a misconception among a fair amount of directors of comic book movie adaptations that they can simply use the source material as a story board. In my opinion, this is a big mistake and couldn't be further from the truth. Yes, it's great fan service when nerds such as myself see these scenes in the trailer and procede to 'ooh' and 'aah'. But, all too often, that's all these types of scenes really accomplish. They're there to appease the fans of the source material; the die-hards who are looking for something that reminds them of one of their favorite comics. It's an easy way of making a film look as if its reverent to its source material, and most of the time this reverence is purely superficial.

A perfect example of this is the Watchmen film, which packed in a ton of shots ripped straight from the pages of the comic. The problem is, a comic doesn't work like a movie story board. In the comic book medium, the reader is completely in control of time. As a reader, you decide how long your eyes dwell on each panel, you can look ahead, and you skip backwards. A movie can't replicate this experience, no matter how hard it tries, and simply ripping an image from a panel, no matter how iconic, isn't a worthy substitute. Zach Snyder would have better served the source material if he'd shot the Watchmen film in a way that made more filmic sense, instead of being a slave to the visual content of the graphic novel. While, this certainly wasn't the hugest problem that movie had in terms of faithfulness to the source, it's one thing that could have made a huge difference in my ultimate opinion of the film.