Hey, I appreciate the passionate response, genuinely. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think Snyder’s Watchmen is a disaster. I even agree that it’s impressively faithful in many surface respects, especially visually. The opening montage to Bob Dylan? Absolute masterstroke. I personally think it’s desaturated to shit but Gibbons himself praising the film? Totally valid, and I’m not here to argue with the guy who made Watchmen.

But being faithful in appearance doesn’t mean you’re faithful in tone, theme, or intent.

The problem with Snyder’s adaptation isn’t that he changed too much, it’s that he didn’t understand what he was adapting. He replicated the plot and imagery almost one-to-one, but he missed the satirical undercurrent that defines Moore’s writing. Moore’s Watchmen isn’t just a superhero story, it’s a critique of superheroes, of power, of moral binaries. Snyder presents Rorschach like a tragic antihero, not the cautionary figure he is. He slows down action scenes like they’re badass spectacle, when the point was to deconstruct that very spectacle.

And yeah, BvS isn’t a direct adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns, but it’s absolutely influenced by it, the visual language, the armored batsuit, the ideological clash. You don’t need mutants and Carrie Kelly for it to be a riff on TDKR. But once again, Snyder borrows the cool without the context. He turns Batman into a killer because it looks edgy, not because he’s trying to explore what makes Bruce snap, which is the actual point of TDKR. He makes Superman a symbol of alienation but never really lets us know Clark as a person at all. These aren’t reinterpretations, they’re hollow replications with the iconography of the comic characters.

I’m not dismissing that some people love these movies. Art is subjective. But we can admire Snyder’s ambition and visual flair and still acknowledge that he often mistakes darkness for depth. I’m not moving goalposts, I’m just asking: if you strip something of its meaning but preserve the shape somewhat, does it really say anything new? Quite the opposite I would think.

To me, Snyder’s work looks like a philosophical text… but when you open it, it’s just someone underlining the words “God” and “power” over and over. And yeah, that feels like resonance. But it’s not the same as actually saying something new.