The Internet pissed its pants yesterday afternoon. Why? Well, because the fanboys got their first real taste of the heavily-anticipated adaptation of the heralded graphic novel “Watchmen,” that’s being directed by full-grown fanboy and film director Zack Snyder (the filmmaker behind “300”).
We’re fans of the graphic novel created by cult comic-book icon Alan Moore, but we read it a few years after the fact and which might be part of the reasonwhy we never considered it as seminal as Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight,” but it is quite good. Regardless, the trailer, more images hit and interviews started appearing everywhere. While the promotional onslaught attack? Cause Comic-Con the nerd mecca of all things super-hero, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. is next weekend in San Diego (a whale’s vagina!).
In the Entertainment Weekly cover story that comes out Friday, Snyder threw down the gauntlet. ”In my movie, Superman doesn’t care about humanity, Batman can’t get it up, and the bad guy wants world peace.”Will Watchmen be the end of superhero movies? Probably not. But it sure will kick them in the gut.”
And then he pretty much pissed all over the gauntlet and said, “how you like me now? Hot enough for ya?”
“And some of this [super-hero] stuff is hard to take seriously. I mean, The Hulk? Come on.” Snyder remembers screening some Watchmen footage for an unnamed studio executive. Afterward, Snyder says, the exec turned to him and said, ”This makes Superman look stupid.”
MTV spoke to Snyder and it’s interesting to note, they visited the set and basically said without the special effects, people looked kind of retarded (“Billy Crudup was wearing a bizarre getup that made him look like a Smurf hooked up to electrodes”). They said the actors put a lot of faith into the director and the special effects. Snyder says what you’ve seen is just the beginning. “That [CGI] stuff is, honestly, in the early days still, so it gets better and better every day.”
Asked whether the movie would represent the more “quiet and meditative” parts of the Watchmen story, Snyder danced around the answer basically saying no in not so many words. “The truth is, the movie is designed to get pop culture excited. And to me, in the end, it is a very intellectual and moral debate that these characters will have. But that doesn’t mean they don’t kick each other’s asses on the way!”
“Watchmen” is a complex, multi-layered mystery adventure and surely it can’t all fit in the film, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t try. Patrick Wilson who plays Nite Owl in the film recently told the MTV Movies blog that Snyder attempted to shoot the entire graphic novel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll make the final cut.
“Zack tried to put everything he could in and he left it to the studio to cut it and tell him what he can’t fit in. For the script we started with, every scene has something different than what’s on the page. That’s the fun of it, building it as you go.”
This fits considering Snyder once said the DVD could be more than 3 1/2 hours long 0r more.
Every couple of months, some magazine dusts off the endlessly quotable Alan Moore, as cantankerous a man as their is (and a practicing magician), and ask him a bunch of easy fishing-with-dynamite questions about “Watchmen” to which he barks out contemptuous answers about his utter disdain for the movie adaptation. EW trolled him out once more just this week (how coincidental!). Moore lives at a moral code not far from Rorscharch and pretty much above every living human being on earth. He detests D.C. Comics, the people that own “Watchmen,” and Warner Bros. – the studio producing the film with D.C. – are under strict orders not to contact him. “I don’t want anyone who works for DC comic books to contact me ever again, or I’ll change my number,” he said flatly. Moore has absolutely zero interest in Hollywood and the dude is such a staunch nutjob man of his word you could pretty much bet the farm that that will never ever change.
[Note: for those that have still never seen the HBO drama “The Wire,” Jesus, even Alan Moore loves it: “It’s the most stunning piece of television that has ever come out of America, possibly the most stunning piece of television full-stop.” This is the type of quote you hang above your desk if you’re David Simon.]
ComicCon is right around the corner, but Moore wouldn’t rightly touch that nerd ground zero with a thousand foot pole. “I find it a bit overwhelming and creepy.”
Rope of Silicon has done an amazing side by side comparison with the trailer and the comics that illustrates Snyder’s almost pathological attention to detail. This sort of shit goes a long way with fans and it’s admittedly quite impressive.
We kind of dissed the trailer yesterday, but we will admit the special effects do look fantastic in the HD version. We were getting more and more impressed with this project as the casting was announced and the realistic pictures were released, but this so-so trailer has put us back on the fence.
One thing’s for sure, DC might be falling behind in the Marvel Vs. DC film universe, but with ‘Dark Knight’ about to strike it rich and “Watchmen” about to own ComicCon, this is surely their week.