Over at the Chicago Sun-Times’ Scanners blog, Jim Emerson asks the key question of the “Watchmen” movie: Is it a good idea to re-read the graphic novel before seeing Zack Snyder’s adaptation?
My standard operating procedure over many years as a movie critic has been to keep the movie experience as separate from the source material as possible — at least on first viewing. Otherwise it can be hard to tell what the movie is doing and what you’re bringing to it from earlier impressions.
If I’ve already encountered a pre-existing version of the “property,” then so be it. I can’t go back and un-experience it. Either way, I can’t judge the adaptation But I usually like to see the movie fresh, and do any research I feel compelled to do afterwards. Then, perhaps, I’ll re-visit the movie, Knowing What I Know Now.
That’s essentially the same way I approach adaptations. If I hear a specific book is being made into a movie, I won’t read that book, no matter how much I may want to. There are no restrictions on catching up to a given book after I see the movie, of course — sometimes it’s essential to writing the review — but for the most part, I want to see how the movie works, or doesn’t work, as a movie.
Now, in this case, Emerson is already familiar with “Watchmen” — though he says he read it so long ago that he “(doesn’t) even remember there was a blue naked guy in it” — so this would be a re-encountering of the text, rather than a new reading. But it’s a good question to pose to those of us who know the book backwards and forwards.
I haven’t read it in several years, myself, but I know it pretty damn well — and I’m still debating whether that was a plus or a minus for the experience of seeing the movie. (For instance: Is it a valid complaint to point out that the movie changes one word in my favorite line of dialogue, when the purpose of the line remains intact?)
Read Emerson’s piece, and think on it. Then tell me what you’d do …