Zack Snyder's Watchmen Movie: Bad Idea
When Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's genuinely seminal comic book series The Watchmen is eventually adapted into a feature film, expectations will be absurdly, ridiculously high. It's one project the world (of geeks) simply needs to see succeed.
Several directors have been attached to the project over the last fifteen years or so. Terry "Perfect Choice" Gilliam, Darren "Okay Choice"Aranofsky, Paul "Well Meaning But Disappointing Choice" Greengrass and now, Zack Snyder.
Zack "Hmmm... Interesting Choice" Snyder.
For my money (what little there is of it) the first ten minutes or so of Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake are amongst the best in all of zombie cinema - and I'm a fool for those zombies. Some later sequences - the delivery of the baby, particularly - tried my patience greatly, however, and there was always a whiff of stylisation that detracted from the project, but for a debut, it was promising stuff, and for a remake of Romero, it was brass-balls bold.
Snyder is now in post-production on his second feature, 300, from Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's comic book. He has adopted similar digital production methods to those used in Sin City, Mirrormask, or that Sky Captain mush - actors shot principally against green screen, their surroundings composited in during post.
A production blog on the official site suggests that Snyder really does know what he's doing, that 300 could more than live up to the opening scenes of Dawn, and be something really worth looking forward to.
But, well, I still don't trust him with The Watchmen. I'm still pretty sure all he will end up using for a script with is a kind of simplified, Reader's Digest version of the original. I can't help but think David Lynch's theatrical cut of Dune is a good indicator of how Snyder's Watchmen would be likely to turn out: sincere, wonderfully constructed, gorgeously shot, oh-so-successful in oh-so-many-ways, but structurally hamstrung, hurried and harried and disorientatingly messy.
The Watchmen tells an enormous story: in running time, in scope, and in importance. I honestly don't believe an abridged adaptation would work. There are only two realistic options.
One: a ten hour film, perhaps divided into chapters and released in a similar fashion to The Lord of the Rings, or maybe made for television.
Two: massive narrative changes that maintain the themes and core ideas of the comic, but play out as a different sequence of events, a new story that is more fitting to a two or three hour running time.
It's fairly obvious that option two would infuriate far more than just the hardcore Moore purists (of which there are many, anyway), so an extended running time seems the only viable way to go if quality is the goal. And what ended Terry Gilliam's relationship with the project? These very concerns. He said he'd only take it on as an extended miniseries.
Despite it's wall to wall effects work and completely artificial other-world settings, Mirrormask cost a stunningly small sum - most reports place it around the $3 million mark. Using a similar production model, there's no reason a 12-hour Watchmen couldn't be brought to life for less than $20 million. This kind of budget would be well within reach - in fact, a feature film version of one fifth the running time is likely to be afforded a budget of ten times the size. Excuse me, but there's something very wrong with those figures.
Paramount are, apparently, the studio holding the keys to the Watchmen kingdom (though correct me if I'm wrong, as Warner Bros. have been mentioned in a number of recent reports). I doubt they'll do the right thing and let the story breathe on TV. I dare say they'll grab foolishly for the possible big returns of a massive opening weekend across thousands and thousands of cinema screens. But I think they'll end up falling flat on their face.
Perhaps the project will remain in limbo for a few more years, while the theatrical distribution paradigm goes swirling down the pan. The miniseries model might appear more obviously correct to the studio then. And, having seen it that way, then maybe - maybe - they'll even end up with Gilliam directing.
Ah, nuts. There's no way that's going to happen.
Something tells me this time is the time, that The Watchmen will go into production later this year, and that Snyder's best-shot at a three hour movie will roll out into cinemas in the middle of 2008. And it'll be a good-shot, a great shot even - just not at the right target.
4 comments:
I've posited before that the best way to film WATCHMEN would be to get Bruce Timm to do it quite literally, using each chapter as a storyboard, leaaving you with twelve short(ish) animations, to be shown together like The Decalogue or Heimat. It'll never happen, but a boy can dream.
So what would you do about the non-comic book sections?
Good point. And one I hoped no-one would bring up... (grabs coat, charges out of room).
Nah, there's no way you can info-dump all that information on an audience, without them choking on the exposition. You'd just have to infer it, through pieces of dialogue, or lingering visual representations (a psychiatric report open on a desk, an ornothology journal on a kitchen table, that kinda thing), and trust the audience to keep up. Where animation would work nicely would be to keep the whole Black Freighter counterpoint, which most advocates of a life action movie would scrap straight away.
Paramount dropped Watchmen about a year ago, citing the proposed $120 million cost being too high (for a studio that threw $180 million at JJ Abrams).
The property sat around for a couple months when Warner Bros. picked it up, which you could say was "bringing the project home", since both WB and DC are owned by Time Warner. By this time, Paul Greengrass had left, so WB looked for a replacement, and I guess after seeing a cut of 300, they decided Zach Snyder was the best person to put on it.
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