The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Watch It, Man!

Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is just beginning to take shape. A few of the actors have been revealed, but we don't really have any idea of what the film is going to look like. Let us pause to savor this moment.

Over the past two decades, a Watchmen movie has gently swung back and forth between being a hypothetical and a slim possibility. And over the last decade, the one that I spent talking to geeks about geek shit on this computer gizmo, I found that most comic/movie nerds fall into one of two camps about a Watchmen movie. There were those that believed that there should never, ever be a Watchmen movie, and those that believed that HBO should make it into a 12-hour miniseries. And it seems to me that both of these positions resulted from a lack of imagination. Both positions presupose that to be good, an adaptation would have to be faithful, that it was the movie's duty to bring Moore and Gibbons' vision to the screen. These views seem to be less and less common these days, maybe because the imminent movie makes them both moot, but more likely because some of the most faithful recent adaptations are not particularly the best ones.

It's true that a two - or three - hour film couldn't convey the complexities written and drawn into Watchmen, so my hope was always that a visionary director would take it, pick out the elements he liked, throw the rest away and make his own movie. And there are enough great images in the book to make several great movies out of.

Back in the late 80's, shortly after the book was published, Terry Gilliam had been attached to Watchmen, and I'll probably always hold images in my mind of the Gilliam Watchmen movie that could have been. Somehow, it seems a perfect blend of sensibilities. I can see what he would have done with the Black Freighter and the apocalyptic ending as clearly as if it had been made. The biggest advantage of that production would have been that Gilliam would surely have seen it my way, and chopped that fucker up (although, come to think of it, his Fear and Loathing is one of the most faithful adaptations ever filmed).

At one point, it was looking like Darren Aronofsky was going to make Watchmen. At the time, I didn't think much of the choice, but since seeing The Fountain, I've realized what an amazing film that could have been. The visual punning in The Fountain is directly descended from that in Watchmen, and if that was the level of visual beauty he was going to bring to the comic, then it really is a great loss.

Then it was Paul Greengrass, who intended to film it in the faux documentary style he ended up using for United 93. Now that would have been interesting. I like that idea because it seems inspired by the comic while posessing its own vision.

So now it's Snyder, and I can't say that really excites me much. I mean, I believe it's going to be a good movie. The cast so far is talented with no really big names, Snyder definitely has a visual flair, and his decision to include the excellent Black Freighter subplot while excising the ridiculous Purple Drank storyline is encouraging. He did a great job bringing Frank Miller's imagination to life in 300, but I'm not particularly interested in seeing someone try to bring Alan Moore's imagination to the screen. I guess, in a way, that I do agree with the people that say they don't want a Watchmen movie. I don't want a Watchmen movie. I want a Terry Gilliam, or Darren Aronofsky, or Paul Greengrass, or Zack Snyder movie that's based, however loosely, on Watchmen.