He really isn't. I'm no Snyder fanboy but he gets a little more flak than is warranted. Watchmen showed a genuine maturation, particularly (and I know I use this example every time I talk about him, but still) the opening credits sequence. I don't love the guy, but I do have legit reasons to think he might become an all-around good director one of these days. And if nothing else, the guy's technical mastery is pretty hard to deny, even if you don't love what he employs it for.
I'm going to go on my "Snyder doesn't 'get' Watchmen" rant for a second. I've voiced this opinion elsewhere on the web, but I'm pretty sure I haven't here. Prepare to retaliate to my know-it-all attitude and rampant iodiocy.
Before I continue, I have been a comic book fan since I was 11-years-old. I started reading them in 1989. I have read Watchmen more times than I can count. It's one of my absolute favorite works of fiction because of it's historical context (I have an affinity for fictional works created during the Cold War fear of nuclear apocalypse), and because it's just damn fine writing. Everytime I read it I come away with something new and I may never completely nail it down myself. Basically I feel it's a work that probably shouldn't have been adapted to the screen because you can't quite capture it completely, partially because it has meta-elements that are exclusive to comics. This gripe with Snyder's adaptation is one of those elements.
Snyder recreated Watchmen without
completely understanding what he was doing.
There are several scenes of extreme violence in Watchmen, both the film and the comic. When Watchmen was released in 86-87 comic book violence was mostly cartoonish and "PG" level. Batman would fight bad guys and the result, at worst, would be a black eye or cartoonish lines of anguish. Then, Watchmen came along and showed what the "real" result of comic book vigilante justice woule look like. Blood, bone, and viscera were displayed in a medium that had never seen it so realistically potrayed. Bad guys were shown with compound fractures, debilitating injuries, and often death as a result of a run-in with the comic book vigilantes, reminding the readers what violence really looks like. Batman suddenly took on a whole new light because of Watchmen.
Add to this the fact that there's a character who can't get it on sexually without first beating people and you've got a whole new level of depravity at work and a comment on comics that is as damning as it is profound.
Enter Snyder's film. Every scene of violence in the film is slowed down to Michael Bay, music video sexy-cool. The characters always look cool and very sexy performing these acts of terrific violence. The scenes of violence even feed into very sexy/silly love scenes within the film that lose all of the impact that they had in the comic. Not only is the violence stylized and cool, but Nite Owl no longer looks like the sexual deviant that was potrayed in the comic. Snyder cut the teeth from the violence by making it "cool" and he trashed the essence of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. He just didn't "get it"!
If he was even half of a decent filmmaker he would understand this concept and would have potrayed the violence in the film as shocking, sudden, serious, and disgusting. There should have been no slow motion. There should have been no moments of character posing or shots of anyone looking movie-poster cool. He maintained the graphic level of the violence without understanding the function it should play in the context of the story. He even makes Dr. Manhattan's explode-a-guy into a slow-motion dance of cinema eye candy which, IMO, completely destroys one of the most potent lines in the tale:
"
God exists, and he's American."
This line should send shivers through the audience, especially when one understands the overall metaphore for the original material, instead it falls flat.
I can also talk about how Snyder missed his mark on the overall metaphore of the story, but instead I'll just quote a couple of paragraphs from the wiki page. These guys can explain it far more eloquently than I:
Bradford Wright described
Watchmen as "Moore's obituary for the concept of heroes in general and superheroes in particular."
[17] Putting the story in a contemporary sociological context, Wright wrote that the characters of
Watchmen were Moore's "admonition to those who trusted in 'heroes' and leaders to guard the world's fate." He added that to place faith in such icons was to give up personal responsibility to "the
Reagans,
Thatchers, and other 'Watchmen' of the world who supposed to 'rescue' us and perhaps lay waste to the planet in the process".
[37] Moore specifically stated in 1986 that he was writing
Watchmen to be "not anti-Americanism, [but] anti-
Reaganism," specifically believing that "at the moment a certain part of Reagan's America isn't scared. They think they're invulnerable."
[3] While Moore wanted to write about "power politics" and the "worrying" times he lived in, he stated the reason that the story was set in an alternate reality was because he was worried that readers would "switch off" if he attacked a leader they admired.
[4] Moore stated in 1986 that he "was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy."
[3]
Citing
Watchmen as the point where the comic book medium "came of age", Iain Thomson wrote in his essay "Deconstructing the Hero" that the story accomplished this by "developing its heroes precisely in order to
deconstruct the very idea of the hero and so encouraging us to reflect upon its significance from the many different angles of the shards left lying on the ground".
[38] Thomson stated that the heroes in
Watchmen almost all share a
nihilistic outlook, and that Moore presents this outlook "as the simple, unvarnished truth" to "deconstruct the would-be hero's ultimate motivation, namely, to provide a secular salvation and so attain a mortal immortality".
[39] He wrote that the story "develops its heroes precisely in order to ask us if we would not in fact be better off without heroes".
[40] Thomson added that the story's deconstruction of the hero concept "suggests that perhaps the time for heroes has passed", which he feels distinguishes "this postmodern work" from the deconstructions of the hero in the
existentialism movement.
[41] Richard Reynolds states that without any supervillains in the story, the superheroes of
Watchmen are forced to confront "more intangible social and moral concerns", adding that this removes the superhero concept from the normal narrative expectations of the genre.
[42] Reynolds concludes that the series' ironic self awareness of the genre "all mark out
Watchmen either as the last key superhero text, or the first in a new maturity of the genre".
[43
Now, if you think Snyder captured what is described so perfectly in those two paragraphs, then I feel you watched a different film than the one I watched. Watchmen is a re-creation of the words and characters without a competent understanding of the source material. I feel justified in writing that arrogant sentence because of what the original Watchmen accomplished.
Anyway, everyone's "allowed" to critique the costumes, and it's not unreasonable, but...to what end? The Thor costumes looked absolutely ridiculous outside of the context of the film, which just ended up being an argument for not seeing elements of a film outside of the context of that film. This Internet contraption leads to a whole lot of premature judging, movie-wise.
I still maintain that criticising the costumes isn't criticising the film. If I think they look like crap it's not a condemnation of the film, it's just me saying the costumes look crappy. Which they do.
EDIT: I meant re-creation, not recreation. LOL!