Zack Snyder told the Guardian earlier this week that his version of Alan Moore’s comic novel was ‘not really a movie, in the traditional sense’. I wish it had been

Zack Snyder has been talking about his adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, which is released on DVD next week. One quote in particular stood out for me:

“It really is not a movie, in a traditional sense. And if you try to analyse it in those terms – and not in terms of its relationship to pop culture – then you kind of miss the point … I wanted people to think it’s going to be a standard superhero movie, and then they’re confronted by all these ideas. Because that’s what the graphic novel did to me when I read it.”

This struck me, because watching the film I wondered whether it was intended only for fans of the book or for a wider cinema audience. At times this labour of love seemed like a shot-for-shot adaptation of the comic, with as little as possible squeezed out during its lengthy running time. Does it work as a movie? Does it work independently of its source material?

I know the book quite well, so it’s hard for me to say for sure, but my feeling is that it does not. Anyone putting Watchmen into the DVD player unfamiliar with the comic and what it was trying to do might well be left baffled by the plot and alienated by some of its imagery and themes.

The first problem is the storyline. Snyder should have had the courage to cut, streamline, and edit the book – which is over 400 pages long and very dense. He tried hard to please the fans by fitting almost everything in – and the result is unwieldy, badly paced, and at times almost incomprehensible. (An extended DVD will include even more material.) Enjoyable as it is to see Rorschach snarl at his fellow prisoners “You’re locked in here with me”, for example, this whole jail sequence could have safely been deleted without interfering with the plot. And there are too many characters, even for a near-three-hour film, with the result that we rush over the most interesting ones – for example Moore’s all-powerful answer to Superman, Dr Manhattan. Some should have been cut or combined.

The second problem is more difficult to solve. Comicbook readers open a comic – or did when Moore was writing Watchmen – expecting a world unapologetically filled with masked heroes, super-powered villains, gaudy colours and simple ideas of right and wrong. Moore and Gibbons superbly subverted these expectations.

But the trick does not work equally well with moviegoers, who enter a cinema expecting a wider variety of themes and settings (although probably not a much more complex presentation of right and wrong). It is unclear what exactly the movie Watchmen is trying to subvert.

Most importantly, some things that don’t necessarily seem ridiculous in comics – superheroes’ physiques, their costumes, capes, secret identities and underground lairs – seem much more silly on screen, when brought to life by real human beings. The leap of imagination or suspension of disbelief is much more difficult to make in films than in comics. And Watchmen does not do enough to make these aspects of the film credible to the general viewer.

This can be seen most jarringly in Nite Owl’s Batman-like costume and his mini aircraft, which stick out like a sore thumb against the naturalism of a dystopian New York. But another example is the narration – in the film, as in the book, provided by Rorschach, a dislikable, rightwing vigilante in a trenchcoat. In the comic this is pitched perfectly between a parody of 1930s detective novels and something more singularly morbid and ominous. Jackie Earle Haley’s dark, gravel-voiced delivery in the movie sends it way over the top. Could a viewer unfamiliar with the comic really take this – any of this – seriously?

Snyder partly acknowledges both these problems in his changes to the book’s ending – he recognises that the arrival of a giant squid would totally ruin any credibility or realism the film has built up, and replaces that with a development that is more thematically satisfying and seems more in line with the film’s internal logic.

The reason why Batman Begins and the first Spider-Man film just about work as movies is because the film-makers tried hard to make you see the characters as people first, superheroes second. The viewer can more or less accept that one person, one time, somehow became a superhero – after all, that’s what the film’s about. But any pretence at realism usually falls apart as soon as the supervillains are introduced. The Green Goblin, Dr Octopus, the Joker, Two-Face – seeing these garish figures spill one by one on to the screen undoes all the good work in making Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker believable. The problem for Watchmen is that it is chock-full of such characters. Each may be well-developed in the graphic novel, but there is no time for that in the film.

There are many interesting and laudable aspects of the Watchmen book – genre deconstruction, impressive use of intratextual devices such as foreshadowing and symmetry, sophisticated, flawed characters, genuine moral dilemmas. These things are relatively common in literary fiction, but we could definitely do with a bit more of them in mainstream films. It is a shame, then, that the Watchmen movie will probably only be enjoyed by those already familiar with the book.