Will ‘Watchmen’ be everything it’s cracked up to be? Creator Dave Gibbons says yes
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From www.nydailynews.com:
Comic-book artist Dave Gibbons realized his opus, “Watchmen,” was finally making it to the big screen after two decades of false starts when he stepped into the cockpit of his beloved Owlship - the giant egg-shaped craft featured in both the comic and the film.
“There it was - this thing that had been in my head and had been put on paper was now real in the world, and I was inside it,” says Gibbons, who was invited to the set by director Zack Snyder. “It was exactly as I imagined it.”
Whether or not “Watchmen,” opening Friday, will be exactly as comic-book fans imagined is the big question. More than 20 years have passed since the tale, published over the course of 12 issues, reenergized the medium, and it has been eyed as a potential Holy Grail of comic-book movies.
But for the longest time, “Watchmen” was thought to be unfilmable. Its flawed heroes include a sociopath and a megalomaniac; its Cold War setting was considered dated; the ending is morally ambiguous, and the source material is dense. There is enough graphic sex and violence to give a faithful film adaptation an R rating, ensuring that the kids who flock to superhero movies wouldn’t be in the seats for this one.
Three studios, and high-powered directors like Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass, tried and failed to make the movie. And this version almost didn’t make it to the screen, either - a lawsuit by Fox over distribution rights was settled by Warner Bros. only last month.
But all involved, both past and present, did manage to agree on one thing: The original story is fantastic. “Watchmen” remains the only graphic novel to have won a Hugo Award, the top prize in science fiction, and critics have called it both the “Citizen Kane” and the “Moby Dick” of comic books.
“It’s such a complex, layered, multifaceted text, with multidimensional characters, that to do it in the amount of time they have in a motion picture, without losing the audience’s attention, seems to be a pretty difficult feat,” says James Carter, professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, who uses the text in class.
Created by Gibbons and writer Alan Moore - a purist who refuses to have anything to do with Hollywood - and published in 1986-87, “Watchmen” takes place in a world where Richard Nixon is still President and the U.S. is on the brink of nuclear war with Russia.
Superheroes have been outlawed and most have retired, except for the godlike Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is in the employ of the military. When one of the former heroes turns up murdered, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) - a vigilante who prefers killing crooks to bringing them in - starts investigating the crime. He warns his former teammates, Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), that there may be a conspiracy afoot.