Unfilmable?

"Watchmen is unfilmable." This has been the mantra amongst hardcore fans for decades, ever since the concept of adapting the book was seriously proposed. For those who believe that, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will likely be bad for you, and you have irreparably ruined an incredible movie for yourself.

Watchmen translates every element of the comic into its cinematic counterpart. Other elements were dropped; most were kept. The most moving part of the book, where Dr. Manhattan explains the nature of his existence, and consequently of the universe, was not told in rectangular frames, and there were no quote bubbles. Somehow, still, one of the most moving comic book scenes became one of the most moving movie scenes. Instead of pencils-and-inks, framing and alignment, this was accomplished through editing, music and voice. For the very shallowest of people who still, despite their shallowness, appreciate and love that sequence in the comic, the translation of themes, feelings and ideas from one medium to another will seem too alien a concept to fully embrace.

Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) shows Silk Spectre II (Malin Ackerman), inside his creation- an emotional shrine of inorganic purity

There's a common practice to consider movies "definitive". No one has ever said "Watchmen is incapable of being made into a theater production.", or "Watchmen is completely incapable of being told through interpretive dance." Why? Because those are competing art forms. They probably won't be very good, but either way nothing has changed. Film, in contrast, is still viewed through a thick fence. Whether they love or hate Hollywood, people will still see it as Valhalla, and the films released- good or bad- will have been handed down from the gods for our judgment.

Aside from the technical practice of combining music, image and performance, there is nothing but social regard that gives the film medium its unspoken omniscience. Books based on movies are called "media tie-ins", but movies based on books are called "adaptations". Is this the objective truth of their nature, or the result of a thick lens through which they are both received and produced?

The fact that elements from a media type- or even a specific body of work- are unfilmable, gives credence to film as an art form. The movie Watchmen was no more limited in resources with which to portray Dr. Manhattan's detachment from humanity than the comic was. There is something deep and incredible about everything that is Watchmen, and to think that only exists in ink, on paper, or in the way it was told originally, is the shallowest of conclusions one can arrive at.

Watchmen, the graphic novel, was not Grindhouse. Its ingenuity wasn't in its ironic mimicry of its predecessors, but in how such a story, and its meditations on humanity and physical reality, could be told through that gimmick. Watchmen is the 'anti-comic book', but that's only the last mile. It both satirizes and glorifies comics- a wicked, brilliant, twisted gloss for something that both satirizes and glorifies the human condition. Not only is Watchmen filmable, and successfully so, but it may in fact be one of the most universal stories of our time.