(Watchmen Review: Spoiler Alert)

If Alan Moore were dead he would have rolled over in his grave. The new Watchman movie butchered the essence of Moore’s statement so completely that it is akin to painting a buck-toothed grin on da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

I do understand why the filmmakers made the changes they did. The master plan that Moore concocted for Ozymandias, the hero-villain, was complicated and hard to translate to film. To do it well, it would have ballooned the three-hour movie beyond the endurance of most move goers. The change made the movie tighter, with less interweaving threads than were present in Moore's sophisticated graphic novel.

In the original graphic novel, Ozymandias had grotesque aliens (that were really grown in a lab on Earth) suddenly appear in New York, LA and other metropolitan centers. Just like in the movie, millions died, but the carnage resulted from physic blasts from the aliens’ minds. While this was understandably hard to translate to the big screen, it was central to the statement Moore made about mankind. Namely, he was saying the way we rid ourselves of assured extinction is to short-circuit the in-group bias reaction we humans are prone to.

In-group bias is the phenomenon that humans (as well as other animals) prefer their own groups. This is the psychological underpinning that Moore glued the story’s climax to. In-group bias can change depending on how those in a group define “us” and “them.” A narrow in-group bias will result in racism. Grow it a little larger it results in regionalism, then nationalism; grow it a little larger and we’re divided by governmental systems based on communism and democracy, which is about as far as we’ve been able to grow the in-groups. What Moore did in his book was to say, if we grew the in-group just a little bit more, so that there is just “us” and no “them” on this planet, peace would be the natural result. This was probably the most profound statement of his 12 issue series and it was completely mutilated by the movie.

With Dr. Manhattan being turned into the pseudo threat, the dynamic changed. Rather than shifting the in-group bias from smaller groups to the overall human race, the movie pins the hopes of peace on mankind’s fear of retribution from a god-like figure. When the Night Owl tosses the line that goes something like, “No one will do anything wrong as long as they think Dr. Manhattan is watching,” he is a modern Jonathan Edwards spinning a sermon about sinners in the hands of an angry Dr. Manhattan. Rather than seeing each other as one race as the solution, the filmmakers are saying, inadvertently or not, that mankind will be peaceful only if subjugated by an authority strong enough to do so. They are saying that Saddam Hussein and Josephs Stalin were onto something. Alan Moore was not saying that at all. If anything, he was saying that if a challenge can pull everyone on Earth together for a common purpose, we might have a shot.

Now don’t get me wrong. It was cool to see scenes from the comic up on the big screen. My mind was able to fill in the gaps where the film fell short, or was altered. I enjoyed the movie. I’m just saying Alan Moore could not have.