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The two adaptations of Watchmen have both missed the point. The Zack Snyder movie treats the characters like gods rather than deeply flawed losers and weirdos.
The HBO series is better, and does get very close, but collapses from a meandering plot and glorifying cops
Did it glorify cops? It's been a few years but I seem to remember the Chief of police being a literal Klansman and chips beating the shit out of people all the time
The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of "what if cops mainly profiled poor white people." That's because the premise is that there's been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.
The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That's the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a "good cop" who is routing out the "bad cops" in order to repair the structure. It's the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show's attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.
Although another way of reading it is that it's a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That's a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I'm stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.
I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.
The good thing about the Watchmen movie was that the ads and hype were the first time I'd heard about it, so it got me to read the Watchmen which is an amazing work.
The bad thing about the Watchmen movie is everything else
The worst aspect is Zack Snyder seems to think Rorschach is a cool dude with cool ideas. They made him talk normally in the movie, maybe that was so he could be more easily understood, but it didn't feel right. He's supposed to seem deranged. In the comic he talks in squiggly text boxes and in an odd kind of halting, broken English. He's not bad at speaking English, he's become so unstable and antisocial his social skills have atrophied. Jackie Earle Haley came across as too earnest or too confident. Like that scene with the therapist reading the ink blots, Rorschach in the comic comes across as pathetic. He's done, doesn't care, doesn't want to live. He says he sees flowers and trees because he just wants to leave the therapy session. In the movie he comes across as like this snickering badass ready to cause trouble. He's like "heh, you can't handle my twisted mind, doc." I hate it. Synder completely misread the scene.
At least the TV show had the guts to show Rorschach would eventually inspire a white supremacist movement
it wasn't Watchmen it was Rorschach: the Movie.Considering thr fact that Rorschach is a stand in for the American crypto-fash to straight up fash lines of thinking that inform the superhero genre, its not strange that Snyder would think hes a cool guy with good ideas.
It's weird because Roschach still comes across as a disturbed weirdo, but he definitely ends up being turned into a more murderous version of the fascist interpretation of Batman.