"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen it's true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, "Save us." ...and I'll look down and whisper "No."
- Rorschach's opening monologue from the comic, 'Watchmen'
"If you approach comics as a poor relation to film, you are left with a movie that does not move, has no soundtrack and lacks the benefit of having a recognizable movie star in the lead role."
-Alan Moore, writer of the comic, 'Watchmen'
For my own part, I'm gonna see the movie version of 'Watchmen' when it comes out next March. (Presuming that Fox and Warner Brothers resolve their legal differences over the movie by then...) However, I don't expect it to be anything more than a 'not funny' version of The Incredibles. (or 'The Tick', or 'Venture Brothers' or 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog' or...) One indicator that a studio doesn't have a lot of faith in a movie like this is the casting of relative no-name actors. (Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan is the only actor on the roster I'm really familiar with. There's also Carla Gugino, from 'Spy Kids' and Malin Akerman, who's highest profile parts so far are as a hillbilly's over-sexed wife in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" and the Farrelly brother's execrable remake of Neil Simon's "The Heartbreak Kid", where she plays Ben Stiller's shrewish bride. Not a good sign.)
As an unabashed comic nerd, you'd think, that on the surface, I'd want to see a movie based on an entertaining comic book. Wouldn't the fact that a mainstream medium was acknowledging my sophomoric interests by validating my previously sad-ham-with-failure-gravy of an existence? You'd think I'd want to see, say, Daniel Day-Lewis degrade himself by emoting lines like, "You'll pay for killing those orphans, Dr. Despair!" And ninety minutes of CGI explosions, giant metal robots, and lady pirate Amazon ninjas. With big, bouncy boobies?
Hold on.
To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, making a movie based on a comic is a little like dancing about architecture. That is, while in a comic the reader can go back to a previous page if they so wish, a movie can only go foreward in time, and has a limited space to tell its story. (Could, say, Chris Ware's comics be translated to film?) Like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the transfer of a specific medium-comics- to another specific medium- film- changes the nature of the thing being transfered. I'm getting a little pretentious here, so let me pull back a bit.
Film, in the commercial sense, is a medium that takes from other mediums and doesn't give back to them. Put it this way: If you've seen the 'Godfather' trilogy, you're not likely to seek out original author Mario Puzo's other works, like 'The Sicillian', for instance. And in the mainstream comics world, the X-men franchise hasn't seen an appreciable increase in sales owing to the recent movies. And why would they? If you are so inclined to seek out the X-men comics, you'll find yourself wandering into a narrative morass that only hours of reading on Wikipedia will enable you to unravel.
And in the case of Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, the level of reference is so convoluted in terms of a narrative, it demands you go back and read it again and again to discover more meaning in the comic. For instance, we notice early on that a random nutcase on the streets of New York is, in fact, the sociopathic vigilante called Rorschach. Little details like airships floating in the background, and the egg-like design of cars, as well as the cigarettes some characters smoke add to bigger details like Dr. Manhattan's influence on American society in this time, as well as the integration of Vietnam as the 51st state. Trying to shoehorn these details into a movie will make the movie's narrative clumsy and full of odd expositional dialogue.
I can only imagine Warner Brothers is hoping they'll cover the movie's costs with its theatrical release, and make money on DVD sales. (Director Zack Snyder talks about the cornucopia of extras that'll be on the DVD.) The whole experience is an attempt to wring as much money out of that particular sponge.
The line of thinking seems to be, "If Warner Brothers make a movie of 'Watchmen', movie-goers will be inspired to seek out the original graphic novel, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will get more exposure as artists, and this will inspire them to create more and better works in the comic genre."
No, it won't. For one thing, DC comics is owned by Warner Brothers, and Moore and Gibbons were treated rather shabbily by DC when they signed the deal to do 'Watchmen'. (One of the main points of their contract was that the rights would reverse to Moore and Gibbons once Watchmen went out of print for a few years. Well, twenty-two years later, we see how useful that clause was to Moore and Gibbons. It's like they're being punished for doing superlative work...) As a result, Alan Moore refuses to work for DC anymore. What's going to happen is that the movie comes out, thousands of internet nerds bitch and argue how disappointing it is, and maybe DC pushes a couple of thousand copies extra of Watchmen over the time period. Not that either Moore or Gibbons would materially benefit from any of it, mind you.
So in an odd way, this legal battle between Fox and Warner Brothers is a good thing. Consider this: The movie's been made, and everyone who's worked on it has been paid for their work, presumably. (The only downer is that people like Snyder and the producers won't see any extra money on it if it never gets released.) If it never sees the light of day, the beetle-browed denizens of the internet who are bitching about it, like,er, me, get their wish of never having a solid work degraded to another, more popular medium. The internet nerds who want to see it get to speculate endlessly about what kind of movie it could be, and argue with each other about who'd be a better casting decision in what particular role. Everybody wins.
Well, not Alan Moore. If he put his name on the movie, he'd be decried as a sell-out who abandoned his principles for a few dollars. And if the movie tanks, he'd be the one taking the blame. ("Alan Moore's seminal 'Watchmen' flops at the box office...") And if it makes bank, Warner Brothers is going to jump to the head of the parade float, taking all the credit. ('Zack Snyder's adaptation of the ground-breaking comic, 'Watchmen' creeps up on last year's 'The Dark Knight' in terms of ticket sales...")
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