A Departure from His Directorial Style: Zack...

This was my very first WATCHMEN article for Gather, posted just after news about the film project was leaked at San DiegoComic-Con 2006. Alooooong time ago. Now, less than three weeks before the film's wide open, I decided to have you guys revisit the first article in a nearly three-year-long series of articles about the making of this historic, intimidating film adaptation.

Originally posted July 25, 2006

Okay, so everyone who has been to either the San Diego Comic-Con or AICN or ign.com knows now that after he gets done with putting the finishing touches on 300, Zack Snyder's jumping headfirst into the Watchmen show. The big question on every Alan Moore fan's mind: Will Snyder do Watchmen right, or will this adaptation of another Moore graphic novel reek of a Norrington botch job (named after the helmer of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Stephen Norrington)?

In an interview with Quint of Ain't It Cool News (hold your snickers, please), Snyder passionately emphasizes the need to be faithful to the source material, while still focusing on making the movie work on its own. "I think Alan (Moore) has said himself that the object of a book is to be a book," Snyder extrapolates, "to be read by the fire and curl up with on a Saturday night. The object of a movie is different."

No one in the know concerning these matters doubts for a second that Snyder will use the same bag of directorial techniques he used on Dawn of the Dead on Watchmen, but various degrees of skepticism exist in regards to the proposed methods which will be used to condense Watchmen to a digestible size for celluloid. Let's face it, no one wants to pull a Bertolucci and make it 360 + minutes, with two intermissions plus an apology from all of the above the line crew for the interminable running length. Plus, the budget would be out of this world; Watchmen looks to be eye candy from start to finish. CG animators could buy some internet businesses with all of the money made from overtime work.

Getting back to the length, on the other extreme, somebody on the more prominent supervisory levels of the project is gonna get a hit put on them if it gets reported that Watchmen will be 90 minutes long. We all know what a 90-minute adaptation of a beloved work means. Entire plots get thrown to the curb, characters weave in and out like female teens at a Planned Parenthood in some urban inner city, and Brett Ratner gets called in to do some patch-ups. (Just kidding with the last one.) Truly, Snyder is messing with heady material. I would not be surprised if the tone of the final cut of the show is overly reverential. Like, something like long shots on the face, profile; lovingly photographed dark alleys; wide, panning shots galore. Yeah, Snyder's gonna have to try out a few new things here.

It's still a bit too early to speculate much on what will happen with Watchmen, but as more news leaks about the extent of Snyder's participation and the treatment of the material, it does seem as though anything, especially Herr Snyder, does will be held under a magnifying glass and deconstructed endlessly on comic blogs and the like, destined to be slashdotted into yesterday until the release date arrives.

Thanks to Wikipedia and the AICN Snyder interview, conducted by Quint.