Watchmen movie is looking good!
David Hollingworth
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Nov 7, 2008 12:07 PM
We check out 20 minutes of footage, and chat with director Zack Snyder.
“Here’s the thing about Watchmen. It’s a story where Superman doesn’t like humanity, Batman can’t get it up, and the badguy just wants to bring about world peace.”
That’s what Zack Snyder, the director of Dawn of the Dead, 300 and now Watchmen, says of the characters in his latest effort to take a classic tale and present a new filmic vision to a modern audience. Of course, he’s not talking about the actual Bats and Supes, but rather, the characters - inspired by many popular and iconic heroes - Alan Moore used to tell tales that were firmly rooted in the iconic comic book tropes he built his Watchmen on.
Snyder was in Sydney yesterday to show journalists, the comic community and a couple of lucky Atomicans 20 minute worth of more or less completed footage from Watchmen. There was some placeholder music and effects (such as the awesome use of music from Koyaanisqatsi for the Dr Manhattan sequence!), but that was in the minority. He spoke briefly to introduce each scene, and then spent some time answering audience questions. But first things first...
We saw three distinct and complete scenes, and they did a good job of not only introducing the themes of the film, but also showcasing the painstaking level of detail that Snyder and his cast and crew has gone to to bring this supposedly impossible-to-film story to life.
The first sequence was the opening ten minutes of the film, which introduces both the central plot of Watchmen – that someone is methodically killing and sidelining now retired superheros – but also the alternate history of this superhero-populated Earth. After we see a murderous fight between ex-hero The Comedian and a black-clad assassin, the credits roll, and we’re treated to a history in montage of the 20th century, but not the one we’re familiar with.
We see the Minutemen, a famous team of supers – or masks as they’re called – and the impact they’ve had on the great events of the 20th century, and then their downfall and eventual outlawing. We see their triumphs and their sordid failures, and that the stamp they have left on world politics is a bleak one.
To say that Snyder has been obsessive in his attention to detail is damn with faint praise. From the kitschy costumes of the pre-war Masks, to the adoring fans of hero Ozymandias (which include The Village People and David Bowie) as he enters Studio 54, it’s a world that’s both easily recognisable and still vastly different. As Moore intended in his original work, this is what the world would really be like if it were inhabited by masked vigilantes.
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.
“I mean it’s all well and good to say Batman fights crime because of his dark past,” said Snyder, “but you’ve got to think there’s some kind of fetishistic thing going on there.”
The preview was over way too soon, and to say that we now cannot wait until March is like... well, like some other equally obvious statement.
But we did learn a lot more about what will be coming out around the film, and afterward. There will be a game, of course, and an extended cut of the film for hardcore fans. “I don’t know much about the game’s development, ‘cause I was making the film while it was being worked on, but I was adamant it be a good product,” Snyder said when asked about tie-ins. “It’s actually ended up being planned as a download, and kind of short, but I do know that the story is going to be good.”
The matter of an extended cut was actually brought up after our forum’s own Battlefield Gir asked Snyder about how hard it must have been to decide what material to cut and what to keep. “Well,” he said, “stuff that doesn’t really drive the story has to go, but there’s still a lot we filmed. And there will be a three hour Black Freighter cut of the film for the hardcore fans. It’s probably all they’re waiting for!”
We’re seeing more superhero movies on the screen than we ever have before, and they are becoming far more successful. Some might be worried that, with such saturation, that Watchmen will get lost in the mix, or simply not be relevant by the time it comes out. “You’ve got to remember, though,” Snyder said in answer to that very proposition, “that that is what the comic book market was like when Watchmen came out in the eighties. Comic book readers knew all about superheroes, and Watchmen was a revelation to them – there’s been no better time to make the movie.”
We might have been sceptical about this project, but now, we agree with him. Roll on March.