Watchmen is a perfect example of how Zach Snyder doesn’t understand what he’s adapting. The original story is a deconstruction of the superhero, showing how sad and broken these characters would be in real life: right-wing murders, rapists, schluby middle-age guys with ED…Snyder takes those characters and films them like they’re cool and bad-ass. Aesthetically, it’s a beautiful, shot-for-shot adaptation, but at no point did it occur to him that the guy in a trench coat muttering to himself about filth and whores wasn’t supposed to be cool. It didn’t occur to him that a group of people who completely fail to stop the villian weren’t supposed to have action sequences straight out of The Matrix. It didn’t occur to him that a story about what superheroes would look like in the real world should be realistic.

The part that truly enraged me was a small moment at the very end. In the comic books, after everyone leaves, Dr. Manhattan goes to see Ozymandias one last time before leaving Earth forever. Ozymandias asks him if he was right in the end, and Manhattan tells him, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” Ozymandias asks what he means by this, but Manhattan leaves without answering. In the movie, Snyder replaces Dr. Manhattan with Owlman in this interaction. Ozymandias’ story ends with a character who is essentially God telling him that his entire plan was pointless, and Snyder swaps out God for the story’s everyman character. It’s a perfect distillation Snyder’s inability to understand even the simplest subtext.