In case you hadn’t noticed, comic book movies have changed to an exceptional degree over the last quarter-century-plus. The landscape was basically dead until X-Men and Spider-Man changed the game in the early 2000s, and the storytelling is so abundant now thanks to the co-existing Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Universe that there are questions of genre fatigue. It’s been a complex journey full of big ups and downs in the last two-and-a-half decades, and two titles that really can’t be ignored in the conversation are Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen – which are actually two films that are inextricably linked.
No, I’m not just referring to the Batman easter egg in the latter’s memorable title sequence that seems to rewrite the Caped Crusader’s origin story. The two blockbusters were released within a year of one another (July 2008 and March 2009), and while they together demonstrated the potential of dark and dramatic storytelling in comic book movies, Snyder credits Nolan’s work for opening the particular door that he ended up walking through. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, the 300 director was asked about how the success of the Batman Begins sequel “helped” his work, and Snyder explained,
I think it’s helped a lot. I think it has. It’s as serious as, like, brain surgery on a baby – which I think is a good thing, I’m not saying that in a bad way – but you can’t have a superhero movie more serious than that. It’s like The Reader. I think it does lay crucial mythological groundwork for the appreciation of Watchmen. Maybe I’m too close to it, but that’s my feeling.
The idea of dramatic comic book movies wasn’t wholly novel in the mid-’00s (the aforementioned Batman Begins isn’t exactly a light romp compared to the follow-up), but they certainly didn’t have the gravitas that existed in the wake of The Dark Knight. With comparisons to Michael Mann’s Heat and eventually seeing Heath Ledger win a posthumous Oscar, the film earned a degree of acclaim that the genre had never seen before, and it was thanks to Christopher Nolan’s grounded vision.
Snyder does note that there isn’t quite a one-to-one comparison to make. Nolan’s movie is a realistic crime epic with zero supernatural elements, and Watchmen is definitely not that. But as Snyder continued, he explained that there are key intersections in the character development and emotionality:
People have said to me, when they talk about the graphic novel, about how it’s gritty and real, and I always go, ‘Yeah, you realize also though that a lot of that book takes place on Mars. And Manhattan is 200 feet tall when he walks through the jungles of Vietnam. And the bad guy-slash-good guy does have an Antarctic lair that looks like possibly like an Egyptian pyramid-ish place.’ That said, it’s difficult for me, anyway, to leave that conversation not going, “Wow, this is a fantastic world.” That doesn’t mean that the characters inside of that world don’t have doubts and fears and are broken, and have to find themselves again.
The existence of the god-like Dr. Manhattan alone is a big differentiator between Watchmen and The Dark Knight, but that big splash of the fantastical doesn’t eradicate the connection between the two movies because they operate with a similar core philosophy: this kind of storytelling can and should be taken seriously. Acknowledging their independent approaches, Snyder said,
The thing about Dark Knight is its objective is to set Batman into your world, so that you can imagine the moral dilemmas he faces are exactly parallel to moral dilemmas that you would face in this world, today, if you were out there fighting crime dressed like a bat. Where I think in Watchmen, because it creates metaphors and symbolism, it has a little freer of a hand. It’s pointing a finger at those exact moments, going, ‘Really? Doesn’t this also remind you of this? Or doesn’t that make you think this?’ That’s where I think that aesthetically the movies diverge.
Should you care to see how the two blockbusters compare nearly 20 years following their respective releases, both The Dark Knight and Watchmen are available to stream with a HBO Max subscription.
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