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Friday, June 23, 2006
Quick Watchmen thoughts
You've probably seen the news that Watchmen has a new director attached to it, one Zak Snyder. I enjoyed Snyder's Dawn of the Dead very much. I'm not a big fan of horror movies but that was a film that had plenty of quirkiness and bloodiness to make a serious impression. The opening is to zombie films what the opening of Saving Private Ryan is to war films.
Based on Dawn though I can't imagine Snyder creating a version of Watchmen that's much like the book. You know what? Good. No one is going to make a film version of Watchmen that is equal to the original version. So I say to Mr. Snyder, producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin and writer Alex Tse, in the .0000000000000003% chance any of you are reading this: go crazy. It's futile to try and recreate how intricate the plot is and the Cold War dread that it depended won't resonant with today's audience. Instead, bring all your own creative ideas to the table and throw out that of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's that doesn't work. Some central ideas should prevail, such as the disillusionment in authority and the ennui that comes from aging and feeling irrelevant (maybe you should bring that '80s feeling then), but from those templates an original vision should arise. Will people complain? People complain about the weather, doesn't stop the rainfall. Don't let the intimidation of working on Watchmen hold you back, use it as a starting point to create something new. Being reverent will just create something stale and that's hardly paying tribute to Moore and Gibbon's vision. Everyone needs a little literary blasphemy now and then.
I've read Sam Hamm's script for Watchmen. The changes Hamm made to the story only appear in the beginning and the end, most notably in reworking the problematic ending. Everything else is a straight adaptation of key scenes from the book. Those changed scenes wouldn't make a great movie, although they could make a good one, but they were the only parts of the script that felt vital. Heed that boys and make yourselves a real barnburner of a picture!
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