Fulltime Casual - An Australian Film and TV Podcast

Movies based on comics suck! Well, except Iron Man. Ok the last few Batman movies have been alright too I suppose.

The Watchmen is the product of one Alan Moore, a serious and frankly cantankerous chap who believes in the medium of comics very strongly. He’s also a failed LSD dealer, and historically has issues with his work being translated to film (he also wrote V for Vendetta amongst many, many others). His writing has tended to be rather heavily praised: The Watchmen actually won a Hugo award, and is listed amongst Time magazine’s All-time 100 novels.

Warner Bros. are making the film version. It’s directed by Zack Snyder and the screenplay was originally written by David Hayter. Moore actually liked Hayter’s adaptation and so in true Hollywood logic Hayter was dropped from the project. His screenplay is being re-written by Alex Tse, an Actor/Producer/Screen writer who I’m sure is going to do a bang-up job and not try to stamp his personality all over the script … actually never mind, he already has.

Snyder is a competent director although I don’t know if I’d call him particularly inspired. Based on his work with 300 it’s safe to assume the look and feel of the film will be faithful to the comics, but I don’t know if he’ll be able to bring a great deal of depth to the performances or nuance to the telling. Moore doesn’t like him very much, but frankly that’s not really surprising. Moore is somewhat …well … (let me quote his Wikipedia entry now) “a vegetarian, an anarchist, a practicing magician and occultist, and he worships a Roman snake-deity named Glycon.”. Snake-deity? Of course! Glycon did you say? Lovely. Waiter can you move me to a different table please?

The link below will take you to the trailer, because I fail at embedding the thingy in the whatsit. It looks like it should be quite good as far as these things go but will it  stack up to the work it’s based on? Let’s err on the side of cautious optimism for the moment.

Watch it at Empire!