That’d be me, I suppose. If I were a smarter man, I’d have just read the script my editor sent to me and write up a quick review. As I’ve clearly established numerous times in my life, though, I’m not a very smart man sometimes. I had to get into the mood for this one. What I have is a copy of David Hayter’s 2003 draft of the Watchmen film tentatively slated for a 2006 release. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Watchmen, sit back and let me fill you in.
Back in the 80s, before comics boomed and burst, Alan Moore inadvertently shifted the focus of comics. He wrote a violent, hyper-realistic take on superheroes called Watchmen. After this, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, all comics became grim and gritty with people sporting trenchcoats and facial stubble as well as ridiculous, angst-ridden stories. Suddenly all heroes had serious emotional problems and you had to be crazy to put on spandex. Though I don’t doubt that you’d have to be a little crazy to be a superhero, I don’t think we’re talking functioning psychotics here. That’s another story, though.
Watchmen was such a seminal work, that people immediately wanted to make it into a film. Remember Tim Burton’s Batman? Remember who wrote it? No? I’m not surprised. Sam Hamm isn’t really all that famous. He went on to write and produce M.A.N.T.I.S. and Monkeybone, both of which are easily forgotten. His work on Batman, however, earned him enough credit with dark comic book characters that he was given the opportunity to write a draft of Watchmen. I recently acquired and read that one, too. It’s awful. It was written only a couple of years after Watchmen was published, before it became almost biblical in stature. He messed with the story and characters a bit, and there was a time when my inner fanboy would have gone into a frothing rage over such sacrilege. Now I just wish that Hayter had taken page from Hamm’s book.
The one serious problem with Hayter’s script, and this is something that can be fixed pretty easily with editing, is that there’s just too much of the damned comic in here. I know there are people who just died a little when I said that, but it’s true. There’s a reason Alan Moore takes a hands-off approach to adaptations form his work. He knows that faithful adaptations are almost impossible if the work is large enough. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is probably the best example of this failure. One of the producers openly admitted that he didn’t read any of the books the characters came from because they were too large and musty. I haven’t seen From Hell, so I can’t really say anything about it’s authenticity. This draft, though, tries way too hard to be absolutely faithful and, as a result, fails utterly.
Dialogue is lifted directly from the comics. This is fine, except that written dialogue does not always make decent spoken dialogue. Jeph Loeb has mentioned this on a few occassions. He writes a little differently for both, as I recall. When you draw this heavily from the source material, you run into problems. A good deal of Watchmen is narrated. Narration in comics and novels is necessary sometimes. In films, it’s the weakest form of storytelling. Don’t tell people what you can show them. Rorschach, one of the protagonists, keeps a journal of his investigation throughout the story. This is what accounts for most of the narration. Could it be done well? Possibly, but you could also skip the narration and just show people what’s going on. There are a lot of things Rorschach fixates on that demonstrate his insanity, and he is very crazy. We can pick this up just form him talking to and/or hurting people. No need for the rest. Enough information can be conveyed simply through conversation that it renders the journal narration pointless.
After all that bitching about how faithful the work is for the trunk of the story, I have to tell you that Hayter did make certain changes near the end. Changes that don’t really make much sense to me. I can’t really get into these difference without revealing the end of Watchmen altogether, so I won’t say anymore. Needless to say, the original ending is incredible and this is just sorta “meh”. We all know that changes are going to be made when this script is translated onto film, so it’s somewhat pointless even talking about it. I just can’t say I’m looking forward to this film when half the material is hopelessly dated and the core of the story is ignored. This film would rock as a hardcore thriller. A lunatic with a mask investigating the murder of one of his former comrades and suspecting that someone is out to destroy every last one of them? Yeah, that sounds pretty good. This is what I’m hoping to see.
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remembers the days when Dr. Fate suddenly grew stubble and carried a knife. He hopes Miller and Moore are sorry they helped give birth to that garbage.
