Ask Wikipedia: Watchmen Movie?

I heard last night that someone's working on a movie based on Watchmen, the influential 1985 comic book (today they call it a graphic novel) about former superhero vigilantes facing the onset of a nuclear war. Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen, is notoriously uncooperative. And I know that Batman Begins was fantastic, but I think we need to move in baby steps. But who knows? Maybe it'll kick ass, and it's being directed by Ang Lee or some such. So this afternoon, I decided to ask wikipedia.

The idea of a Watchmen movie has been taken up and abandoned many times. Terry Gilliam was attached at one point in the late 80s, and Daron Aronofsky (!) also once was involved. Both of those were abandoned though. Now, though, they've actually shot the thing. Zack Snyder directed, and Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl), Billy Crudup (Doctor Manhattan), and the dead husband from Weeds (The Comedian). The cast sounds solid enough, but I'm not sure about this Zack Snyder guy. He directed 300 and the Dawn of the Dead remake. It was written by someone named Alex Tse whose IMDB is really thin.

You knew the best part of this was going to be what Alan Moore had to say, right? Dave Gibbons, the book's artist, seems to have been ambivalent about the script, without denouncing it. But here is a quote from the section entitled "Moore and Gibbons' response:"

In a July 2007 interview, Moore said of Snyder's project, "If they go for some other novelty option like they did with V For Vendetta then I'm in for another year of excoriating them in every interview I do until they remove my name from it."Before shooting, Snyder said "[I] totally respect his wishes to not be involved in the movie." [...] "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic." Moore said that Terry Gilliam, preparing to direct Watchmen for Warner Bros. at the time, had asked Moore how the writer would film it. Moore told Graydon about his response, "I had to tell him that, frankly, I didn't think it was filmable. I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't."

Unfilmable is the key word in there. I tend to think that Moore is right. Flipping through my copy of Watchmen as I write this, it becomes increasingly clear just how unfilmable the story really is. Miracles can happen, though–wasn't Sin City unfilmable? I certainly thought it was, and now I think thats one of the Top 5 comic book films of all time. I'm not giving it number one or anything, but still.

Oh, and to Warner Bros' credit, they do have a pretty decent official website/blog up about the production. It seems shooting has wrapped. Now we wait and see.


Watchmen (film) [en.wikipedia.org]
Official Website [watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com]