When the trailer for Watchmen hit the web a few weeks ago, I was as pumped as anyone. I’ve always been a fan of comics, but when I finished reading Alan Moore’s opus for the first time, I closed the back cover, starred into space, and solemnly said, “This changes everything.” Seriously, it’s that good. And the trailer looks good, it appears to be a faithful adaptation of the source material.

The key word here is appears. The visuals are stunning, some sites even took the time to do shot by shot comparisons with the book. But I’m not worried at all about that, I’m more concerned with how the film will be edited. Like most comics/graphic novels, Watchmen is practically a story board waiting to be transformed into a film. But what made the book so revolutionary was not the art, it was the story, and the way the story was told. Watchmen is a dense web of complicated interconnected stories. Multiple generations of characters deal with epic personal, philosophical, and political struggles, all woven into one masterwork.

Watchmen, the book, excels at the graphic novel version of cross-cutting. Several pages contain nine panels that are set up like a checkerboard, alternating between two separate stories that intimately inform one another, albeit across expanses of space and time. On the one hand, this seems like source material for a final-scene-of-The Godfather level of powerhouse editing. But on the other hand, it could just be a huge mess.

After the jump, Snyder says why he feels up to the challenge…

I asked director Zack Snyder to talk about the differences between adapting a work like 300, whose achievement is primarily visual, with Watchmen and its emphasis on narrative. He said, ”I feel like for me, movies are about perspective and point of view. When we did 300 I was trying to get at Frank [Miller]’s point of view, like what does he think, how does he feel?”

He went on to say, “I love this idea of self awareness, you know, that all my movies have. I think there are some people that take 300 super heart attack serious … If you’ve seen Dawn of the Dead, and once you see Watchmen, I think if you go back and look at 300 it will change your point of view on that movie … I love 300, and it’s exactly the movie I wanted to make, but when people see it without understanding me, they feel like it’s purely visual. Which, you know, makes sense, but I feel like what I try to do is get at Frank, you know, get at what makes Frank tick, and what he’s about. And I think that was also true of Dawn of the Dead, for whatever reason, I’m a fan of George [Romero]’s and I wanted the movie to be a love letter to him more than a remake of his movie. So when we came to do Watchmen it was that same experience again. I was trying to figure out, what is it about Alan [Moore]’s work, what is it about this work that is individual. What is that perspective, what is that point of view?”

I’m assuming what Snyder is talking about is the way Watchmen critiques the tropes of super hero mythology. Earlier in the same press conference he talked about how the world is finally ready for the film because so many other comic book films have been so successful, thereby building a set of assumptions about super heros that can now be critiqued. That’s great. But what still worries me is that the real key to Alan Moore’s “point of view” is that he’s just a freaking incredible story teller. And, as reported earlier, Moore has absolutely nothing to do with this film. I wish Zack Snyder the best of luck in editing the film, he’s going to need it.