Snyder's Watchmen is 75% faithful to the comic

No one had ever measured how much of the comic survived in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. The SnyderVerso channel took the measure: it broke down the work of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons into 53 moments and checked them one by one in the 2009 film, in a video that came out on Thursday, October 8th. It gave 75%.

The method is a school test. An equal moment is worth one point, almost the same is worth three quarters, changed is worth four tenths, just mentioned is worth a quarter and cut is worth zero. Result: 42 of the 53 are the same or almost the same in the cinema, and the score rises to 79% in the Ultimate version, the 3 hours and 35. As the channel chose the moments, the honest range is between 70% and 80%. And there is one detail that matters: the comic told frame by frame, the Motion Comic, lasts 5 hours and 25. The cinema film is half that.

It could have been very different. When the project arrived at Snyder, shortly after 300, the studio wanted a 13-year censorship, franchise style and the story taken to the war on terror, with Dr. Manhattan in Iraq instead of Vietnam.

I felt like if I didn’t do it, [the studio] would do it without me, and the way they were going to do it was going to be really [awful].

Zack Snyder, in a round table with university newspapers published by the Columbia Chronicle, 03/16/2009

So he filmed the book. He drew the storyboards on top of Gibbons’ paintings and left the comic in the hands of each actor on the set.

The ending that Gibbons designed

The big change is the end. In the comic, Adrian Veidt releases a giant squid in New York. In the film, he fakes an attack using Dr. Manhattan’s energy. And the idea wasn’t even Snyder’s: according to screenwriter David Hayter, it came from a physicist friend of Darren Aronofsky, the director who only spent a weekend on the project.

The curious thing is who approved it. At Snyder’s request, Gibbons drew the new ending like a comic book page, with John Higgins’ colors, and told TIME magazine that it looked like lost pages from Watchmen. Afterwards, he saw the film at least seven times.

I can’t imagine a more faithful adaptation: it has all the detail, all the visual richness, all the emotional richness of the original.

Dave Gibbons, co-creator of Watchmen, at Rotten Tomatoes, 7/27/2009

Moore took his name off the credits and, according to Gibbons, he never saw the film. Of the two men who created Watchmen, one didn’t watch it. The other took the pencil to draw Snyder’s ending.