Seems as though the Watchmen movie is on every fanboy’s mind. Everyone keeps talking about the movie trailer; how this is going to be the greatest comic-book movie of all time. Hey, did you ever notice how “of all time” means “until the DVD sales dry up”? Really. I’ve heard “of all time” applied to movies like Tim Burton’s not-holding-up-well-at-all Batman, and even the appalling Superman 3. But anyways, everyone’s talking about how great the Watchmen trailer looks and how this will be the book brought to life; lo, there will be much rejoicing in the theatres, women shalt bear their breasts while the angels sing Hallelujiah, etc.
Ain’t gonna happen.
There’s a lot of books out there that were written specifically to be turned into screenplays (the Da Vinci Code, anyone?), and Watchmen isn’t one of them. It’s just too wonderfully complex. There are subtleties in the panels that are just not going to translate to film. I think that Watchmen might — MIGHT be possible as a twelve hour miniseries, giving each of the backstories enough time to develop properly like the book did. But a couple of hours of screentime won’t be enough, no matter if the director’s putting the Tales of the Black Freighter on a separate DVD (and why does he have to do that in the first place, if this is such a dead-on adaptation? It’s either up there on the screen or it isn’t).
It’s not that I’m not a fan of Alan Moore —- it’s BECAUSE I’m a fan of Alan Moore that I refuse to go see this film. I suffered through From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and even Return of the Swamp Thing… you know, you can only put your hand on a hot stove for so long before realizing that you’re just going to get burned again. I have always and will always continue to buy Mr. Moore’s fantastic comic books; I can’t wait for the next League books and am just dying for his ‘history of magick’ volume to come out in a few years. But I’m done with reading people’s pathetic attempts to translate his works into mediums that they were never intended for.
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