How Zack Snyder’s Watchmen predicted superhero culture’s rise to dominance

It is potentially the most divisive event in comic book fandom since Tobey Maguire’s spidey bop in Spider-Man 3. On 18 March, American streaming network HBO Max releases a 242-minute “Snyder Cut” of the 2017 critical flop Justice League (it will be available on video on demand in the rest of the world). 

This is essentially a new movie. Man of Steel director Snyder has added some three hours of original footage to the juggernaut. He will pit Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and other DC Comics regulars against a rogues’ gallery of rebooted villains, including Jared Leto’s Joker. 

Snyder is Hollywood’s ultimate marmite director, equally adored as a visionary and dismissed as grandiloquent and pretentious. For that reason it is likely the “Snyder Cut” will prove hugely contentious. Yet it is often forgotten that he has also given us one of the great superhero films of the modern era. Watchmen, his bare-knuckle adaptation of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic series about depraved and depressed crimefighters, with superpowers and superflaws to match, stands as a chilling portent of where the oeuvre was headed. 

Superheroes are an inescapable reality in the world of Watchmen. They have taken up permanent residence in our head space. Snyder, in other words, foresaw the day they would seep into every crack and crevice of popular entertainment. And he asked us to reflect on what that could mean.   

Extraordinarily, he did so just as the modern superhero industrial complex was coming into being. By 2009, the year of Watchmen’s release, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in the process of bolting itself together. Soon it was to be fully-operational and all-conquering. Superheroes would dominate the multiplex. And then, with WandaVision on Disney Plus, they began their apparently inexorable march on TV, too. 

Snyder’s Watchmen was not immediately heralded a work of genius. Moore, a druid-like figure from Northampton who believes his books impossible to film, had already distanced himself from any attempt to bring the project to the screen. 

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Critics disapproved, too. “Grim and grisly” was the assessment of the New York Times. “Staid and straightforward” lamented the New Republic. The Independent said that, rather than conjuring “catharsis”, Snyder simply brought on “weariness”.

Watchmen, we can now see, was the right film at the wrong time. Five years later, after Captain America, Thor, The Avengers and an Iron Man trilogy, Snyder’s grim portrayal of a world presided over by superheroes would have landed far more resonantly. And that’s to a large degree because he does such a devastating job bringing to life Moore’s original premise: what if superheroes were real but just as flawed as the rest of us? 

That idea is fleshed out by characters such as Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach. He is a cross between Batman and a meth addict (with a mask that constantly ebbs and flows into creepy Rorschach test patterns). And, most pointedly, by Billy Crudup’s Doctor Manhattan. A godlike being who exists across time and place, he’s essentially a mix of the Jolly Green Giant, a moonlighting member of the Blue Man Group and Superman. These are superheroes with all the romance and the truth, justice and the American way propaganda stripped away. And they are terrifying.

The thumping irony, of course, is that Snyder was soon a cog in the superhero machine Watchmen skewers so effectively. 

He would go on to helm the DC “Extended Universe”, directing 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel. That led to his universally panned Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a deafening flick from 2016 that not-so-secretly wanted to be a Wagner opera-cycle. 

And then he would move on to Justice League until the tragic death of his daughter forced him to exit the project. Justice League was completed by Avengers director Joss Whedon, who foolishly renosed the film in his “quippy” style. 

Fans hated it. And so did Snyder, it would appear. Hence his return with a “Snyder Cut” that will bring to life his original vision.

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All of Snyder’s DC films are doom-laden and over the top.  Yet how deft he was on Watchmen. The storyline cuts clear and true, and with an agility that would desert Snyder in the years that followed. As the action begins, boorish superhero Comedian (The Walking Dead’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has been killed in his apartment by a mystery assailant. 

Nobody is mourning this nasty piece of work who was responsible for the JFK assassination (we see him take his shot from the notorious grassy knoll in the opening credits) and has a list of enemies longer than Wonder Woman’s golden lasso. Rorschach, though, smells a conspiracy and investigates further.

As the plot thickens, we are introduced to former superheroes such as the Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Åkerman). All were forcibly retired having helped win the Vietnam War on behalf of Richard Nixon, who, in the mid 1980s setting, is enjoying a fourth term in the White House.

And then there is the Tony Stark of the gang – the smug and unflappable Ozymandias (Matthew Goode). This prince among superheroes is seemingly less concerned with the death of Comedian than the looming threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.

“When we did Watchmen, I was trying to think what these very ridiculous characters would be like if they were actually existing in a real world,” Moore told the BBC’s Hardtalk in 2012. “In the real world we have lots of traumatised children. Very few of them go on to become bat-themed vigilantes. I was trying to imply that if you are going to put on a costume and fight crime it would probably be for all sorts of unpleasant and complex reasons.”

That idea struck with a punch as the first of Watchmen’s 12 instalments debuted in comic book stores in September 1986. Darker stories – such as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which had come out the previous February – were in vogue, so its arrival was timely. Moore’s story and its unnervingly bright art by Dave Gibbons were perfectly attuned to an era in which wise-cracking heroes in spangly pants were passé.

However, Snyder’s Watchmen is arguably more impactful. By 2009, superheroes were no longer a geek subculture. Thanks to Marvel, they were on their way to becoming a pop-art steamroller. Marvel had launched its Cinematic Universe the previous year with Iron Man. Blockbusting adaptations of Captain America and Thor would follow. 

Snyder could, it is hard not to infer, see where this was going. His own directorial breakthrough was a 2006 adaptation of Frank “Dark Knight Returns” Miller’s swords and sandals epic 300. Watchmen, though, is his best film.  And it’s difficult to view it as anything other than a commentary on this looming ubiquity of men and women in tights. 

He packed the screen with meta-commentary. Ozymandias’s tight-fitting costume winks at the “Bat nipples” modelled by George Clooney in 1997’s Batman and Robin. Rorschach was a parody of the grimdark “vibe” of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight (hugely influenced by Miller). 

And the unsettling implication of a world in which Superman was the mightiest being on land or air is alluded to in Doctor Manhattan, whose superiority to humanity has left him unable to relate to other conscious beings. He’s both the most powerful and loneliest guy in the universe. 

The idea of superheroes as amoral, despairing and indifferent to human suffering was incendiary 12 years ago. And that’s without touching on Watchmen’s twist ending, which frames one particular “hero” in an even more scathing light. But today, with Marvel ruling the box office, its message that superheroes are not to be trusted feels even more subversive. 

Earning $185m on a $130m budget Watchmen was not a sensation. Snyder moved on and in 2013 was giving us his take on Superman in Man of Steel. 

Yet it is tempting to conclude that Watchmen’s message continued to resonate with the director. Despite a game performance by Henry Cavill, the Superman we meet in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman and with whom we will resume acquaintances in “Snyder Cut”, does not cut a sympathetic figure. 

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He’s as all-powerful as Doctor Manhattan and just as disconnected from mankind. At the end of Man of Steel, he and his nemesis General Zod (Michael Shannon) wage a pitched battle in the middle of Metropolis. 

Skyscrapers are chucked back and forth. Superman does not appear in the least concerned about the devastation wrought or lives lost. He is behaving just like one of Watchmen’s anti-heroes.

There was another coda to the story in 2019 when HBO produced a sequel to the comics as a TV series, which showrunner Damon Lindelof (a co-creator of Lost) described as a “remix”. Taking up the tale 34 years on from the events in the strip, it uses superhero culture as a prism through which to interrogate America’s legacy of racism.

Lindelof, in so doing, perhaps offers a subtle pushback against the idea, implicitly put forward by Moore and Snyder, that superheroes are inherently infantile. Lindelof’s thesis is that they can be a vehicle for sophisticated storytelling with contemporary resonances.

The legacy of Watchmen is likewise carried forward in Amazon’s The Boys. This series features a cast of amoral and often downright evil superheroes hiding behind airbrushed images. The most unnerving example is Antony Starr’s Homelander – a Superman parody who views humans as helpless mites to be crushed without a second thought. The Boys, adapted from the Garth Ennis comic, is one of Amazon’s most popular original dramas. But it is ultimately only here for the gross-out gags, with every second episode seeming to feature an exploding head or fountain of blood and with the violence played for laughs. It lacks Watchmen’s higher purpose. It has a sense of humour while missing a soul. 

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Both it and the HBOWatchmen are in Snyder’s shadow. Viewed today his Watchmen isn’t merely an effective adaptation of a cult comic. It is a warning about what was coming down the track as popular culture was colonised, as never before, by superheroes. With Marvel’s crime-fighters quipping their way to the top of the box office and DC trying, failing and then trying all over to reboot key franchises, Watchmen today exists as an alarm bell sounding loudly and clearly. 

“Who Watches the Watchmen?” a graffiti artist scrawls as the movie opens. The question can now be repurposed: in a world where Marvel and DC look certain to duke it out for eternity, who will save us from the superheroes?