Watchmen movie is looking good!

As Snyder said (or as I keep wanting to call him, for some reason, Snydey), it wasn’t an easy to road to get the studio to keep the dark atmosphere.

“When I got the call, I came into the studio, and they pretty much told me to make Watchmen, and to make it a particular way,” he said before any footage was screened. “The script I had was all about the War on Terror... yeah, people ‘love’ the War on Terror. Essentially, Hollywood was saying ‘We’ll tell you how to make it’.”

But that changed, he said, after the success of 300, his adaptation of Frank Miller’s hyper-violent, hyper-stylised historical epic. “What about the Cold War, I said, and they liked the idea. So I was able to go away and write my own script, and keep coming back to them with new changes.”

The process completely changed the project from a film that the studio wanted set in the modern era, about the War on Terror, to a film set in a 1985 that still has Nixon as President of the United States of America. It’s a world where America won in Vietnam, thanks to the personal intervention of the God-like Dr Manhattan (“The superman exists”, says a newscaster in one sequence, “and he is an American!”).

In fact, the second sequence we were treated to was about this blue-skinned being. We see his creation, during a tragic science accident (“It’s a classic trope,” says Snyder, “that messing with science is dangerous, and it’ll change you.”), and the attempts of the US government to turn him into some kind of a superweapon – with some success, too. One scene sees hundreds of Vietcong kneeling before him, surrendering to him in near worshipful silence; another sees him casually destroying fleeing soldiers with a casual wave of his hand.

But, as Dr Manhattan tells us via a mournful voice over, the power comes at a cost – both to those he loves and his own failing humanity.

Like all the sequences we saw, this one was over too fast, but it did get to the heart of something that the Watchmen has always striven to illustrate – that it’s the uplifting of these figures by their fans and the people who rely upon them that ultimately drives them away.

Well, that, and the fact that just maybe, having the ability to pop someone like a bubble could be damaging to one’s psyche.

The final bit of the film we saw – at least until Watchmen’s March 6 release next year – illustrated another way being a hero can change you. Silk Spectre and Night Owl, after years of retirement, discover that they’re now only capable of, well, ‘getting it on’ after dressing up in their crime-fighting costumes and bashing some evil heads. (Of course, when one of those costumes is a slinky latex number, that kind of makes sense.) So off they go to rescue fellow Mask Rorschach from prison.

Not so much out of kindness, but more foreplay.