EW wrote:'Watchmen': Inside Zack Snyder's Outrageous New Movie
Sure, all superhero movies are violent. But this one revels in blood, sex, and politics. It took 23 years to get to the big screen. Now, we're going to find out who can handle it. Are you ready to watch ''Watchmen''?
They have come to glimpse the miracle. They have come to witness the revolution. They have come for Watchmen — the allegedly unfilmable superhero movie, the long-awaited adaptation of the comic book that changed the face of comic books forever. On this warm July morning, over 5,000 fans attending the annual geek pop summit known as Comic-Con have assembled inside the San Diego Convention Center for a first look. Many spent the night on the sidewalk. Some have come in costumes — most modeled after Rorschach, a vigilante with an inkblot mask and a pitiless brand of justice that makes Batman look like Bambi. Behind the stage, indie-movie icon Kevin Smith, a.k.a. the Most Famous Fanboy in the World, parks himself in front of a closed-circuit TV, a happy grin on his bearded mug. ''You have to understand, I've been waiting for this moment for years,'' says Smith. ''This is it, man. This is the pinnacle. You have no idea how f---ing pumped I am.''
All this, for a violent, ironic superhero epic that doesn't like superheroes in the first place. Directed by 300's Zack Snyder, Watchmen presents a set of familiar superhero archetypes — and then subverts them completely, turning them into criminals, jerks, narcissists, megalomaniacs, and plain ol' whiny wusses. Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley) is like the Spirit...except he's a joyless, hard-line misanthrope. The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is like Captain America...but loyal only to sadistic thrills and a corrupt worldview. Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) is part Batman, part Iron Man...except he's also a schlubby, impotent coward. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is the resident genius...who's built an empire on superhero toys. (You see what we mean by irony.) Says Billy Crudup, whose blue, naked Dr. Manhattan is an almighty Superman dangerously detached from his own humanity: ''Watchmen is a kind of thrilling thought experiment. What would people who dress up in costumes to fight crime actually be like? Well, they'd probably be fetishists who lived on the fringes of society. They'd all be a bunch of freaking lunatics.''
Yet for all its self-awareness and cynicism, Watchmen isn't some cheap-and-silly Scary Movie parody. Adapted faithfully, if not completely, from the celebrated 1986 comic-book series, Snyder's film is visually and intellectually ambitious, filled with heady ruminations about savior figures, pop culture, and the politics of fear. At a time when superhero stories are commonplace and our shaken country is pinning its recovery on an idealistic new president, Watchmen's director believes his movie can serve as a bracing blast of healthy skepticism. ''Someone asked me if I thought that because Barack Obama had been elected president, the movie was no longer relevant. I said, 'Wow, that's a very optimistic view of the future!''' says Snyder. ''The movie, like the comic, says, 'These superhero stories you've been feasting on? What if we took them seriously? What if we thought through the consequences? Where do they get us?' That's the fun.''
But fun for whom? When Watchmen hits theaters on March 6, the comic-book cognoscenti will be there in droves — although some are already sweating the heresy of dramatic changes. Still, for mainstream moviegoers, such talk of ''subverting superhero archetypes'' is liable to elicit a great big ''Huh?'' Watchmen's financial backers are clearly hoping the success of The Dark Knight has primed the market for sophisticated superhero films. Especially one that's two hours and 41 minutes long. But where The Dark Knight transcended genre conventions, Watchmen wallows in them. Violently. In Snyder's film, the good guys don't let the bad guys talk crazy talk for umpteen minutes before turning them over to the cops — they hatchet their heads or obliterate them into bloody chunks. Has the world gone geeky enough that it can embrace a tough-sit superhero satire? ''Well,'' says producer Larry Gordon, who has spent more than two decades trying to bring Watchmen to the screen, ''I guess we're about to find out, aren't we?''
Created by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons and first published as a 12-issue serial in 1986, Watchmen is most often praised as the comic book that brought respect and maturity to a medium long dismissed as juvenile. It was the fanboys' Catcher in the Rye — and maybe their first Playboy, too. ''I was 13 when I read Watchmen, and it came to represent my coming of age,'' says Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, who cites the comic's use of origin-story flashbacks and hidden clues as a major influence on his show. ''I would devour each issue over and over again, knowing that I was missing things because I was too young to grasp them. But at the same time, I was so excited by the violence and, yeah, the sex. I felt like Watchmen was this very, very bad thing that I shouldn't be reading, and if my mom caught me with it I'd be f---ing doomed.''
Hollywood was similarly struck by Watchmen, but has been much less successful at avoiding the doom. In 1986, Twentieth Century Fox acquired the comic's rights for producer Larry Gordon, but could never get an adaptation rolling. Over the next decade, Watchmen bounced among many studios and between many directors (including Brazil's Terry Gilliam and The Wrestler's Darren Aronofsky) before finding what appeared to be a happy ending at Paramount. But in 2005, with helmer Paul Greengrass deep into preproduction, a Paramount regime change killed the project. As Gordon's producing partner Lloyd Levin explains, ''It was very difficult for every studio exec to appreciate all its aspects.''
Admittedly, some of those aspects are truly odd. Watchmen is set in the year 1985. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are on the brink of nuclear war, and the president is Richard Nixon, whose success at ending the Vietnam War (he asked Dr. Manhattan to blow up the Vietcong) has earned him five terms of office from a grateful nation. Conservative politics are popular, as are Indian fast food and pirate comics. But costumed heroes, once all the rage, are now outlawed. When the Comedian gets murdered, Rorschach tries to round up his old allies to investigate. They eventually uncover an insidious conspiracy hatched by an unlikely villain, one whose grand ambition isn't world domination but something else altogether.
And that's only half the comic. Hence, Watchmen's rep as the Unfilmable Graphic Novel. But tides changed in late 2005 when Warner Bros. acquired the property from Paramount (or at least they thought they did; more in a minute) with the hope of rolling on Watchmen ASAP. ''I had been a big fan of the graphic novel and had been looking for ways to make it into a movie,'' says Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros. Picture Group president. ''It felt different and left-of-center from anything else out there, and we felt that in the hands of a director with a strong vision, it could be provocative in a way that could appeal to a broad audience.'' The studio turned to Snyder. At that point, the director had only done stylish TV commercials and the 2003 zombie remake Dawn of the Dead. But he was also deep in the middle of shooting the studio's action epic 300, another adaptation of a brilliantly brutal comic, and the execs liked what they were seeing. Snyder was interested. Wary, but interested. ''My first reaction was 'This can't be done. It probably shouldn't be done,''' says Snyder, who had joined the Watchmen cult during his art-school days in London. ''But then I said, 'If you really are going to do this, here's how I think you should do it...'''
Snyder's approach was simple: He would remain religiously faithful to the comic. ''We treated that thing like a freakin' illuminated text,'' says the director, who embraced all the peculiar idiosyncrasies, from the Nixonian alternative America to the deep-dive digressions into character origin stories. Snyder's take ran counter to nearly every single version of Watchmen Gordon and Levin had developed in the past. The Greengrass iteration, for example, updated everything and swapped out the Cold War context for the war on terror. ''We wanted the movie to speak to its time, just as the comic book spoke to its time,'' says Levin. ''But Zack's approach was 100 percent correct. He showed that the book as it was created in 1985 worked as an allegory for what was happening right now.'' Plus, as Gordon puts it, ''I think if we had made this thing any other way, we'd be hiding in the hills, because the fans would want our heads.'' (None of this faithfulness can please Moore, who feels that no adaptation can do his work justice and has taken his name off the film.)
The director also believed that an ''adult'' superhero epic needed to be explicit about its ''adult'' content. He wanted to hear the characters' philosophical musings. He wanted to see the blood spurt. And instead of the chaste kisses of most superhero movie romances, he wanted to see some naked getting-it-on. ''I wanted to make sure everyone understood: This is not a kid movie,'' says Snyder. ''Violence has consequences. And doing that with a PG-13 just dilutes that message.'' Bringing Watchmen's R-rated mayhem to life took a psychic toll on the cast during the course of a five-month shoot in 2007. ''He's the most unsettling character I've ever played,'' says Jackie Earl Haley of Rorschach, Watchmen's most tragic and defining character. Haley — who earned an Oscar nomination in 2007 for playing a sexual predator in Little Children — was particularly unnerved while shooting scenes of Rorschach's harrowing origin story, which culminates in a brutal encounter with a child killer. ''There were days where it was just so graphic. Hours later, I'd be lying in bed, getting little flashes of what I had to do, and just go, 'Whoa.'''
And then there was the worry that all that effort was all for naught. Last February, Twentieth Century Fox sought to stop Warner Bros. from moving forward with Watchmen's release, claiming via lawsuit that Warner Bros. had not properly acquired the distribution rights. The dispute exploded in the media last August when a judge declared that Fox's lawsuit had merit. ''How do you not know whether or not you have the right to make a movie?'' says Crudup. ''Hilarious.'' But after months of intense press coverage that put Watchmen in the mainstream eye, the two studios reached a settlement. ''It was scary, dude,'' says Jeffrey Dean Morgan. ''I thought for a while there that the movie would wind up on a shelf somewhere. But that sure as hell made for some great publicity, though.'' (Warner Bros. and Fox both declined to comment. As for producer Gordon: ''It was unfortunate,'' he says simply.)
Now Team Watchmen waits to see if any of that notoriety can help make them some money. With a $100 million-plus budget and a running time of 161 minutes, Watchmen will need to launch with a big opening weekend and strong reviews. ''The movie is impactful, tough, and true to the book that we all loved, and I'm very proud of it,'' says Robinov, who believes the film — every minute of it — has broad appeal. Snyder hopes the female fans he gained from 300 (and Gerard Butler's abs) will watch Watchmen, too, though it's hard to imagine that they'll be buzzing about this film in the same way. ''I think its human themes appeal to all,'' says Malin Akerman, whose character Silk Spectre is a knowing commentary on the obligatory superteam-sexpot heroine. ''But I do think men will have a much easier time swallowing all the violence.'' So, will geek love — and geek dollars — be enough? Snyder hopes so. He says he made the film for that crowd. ''I don't think there ever has been a movie more custom-made for them. Not at this scale,'' he says. ''And now they have an opportunity to really influence pop culture in a serious way, just as the comic influenced comics. They can say: 'These stories can be used to say something about the world. Give us more of them.'''