As we've said pretty much every week for the last, oh, say, year and a half, we intend to bring you every single bit of news we possibly can about Zack Snyder's forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen, widely held to be the best superhero comic ever written. (By the way, this is approximately the nine billionth article I've written about the guy, and I still have to check to see if his first name is spelled 'Zack' or 'Zach'.) And, as we will probably continue to say for the next, oh, say, year and a half until the movie actually opens, we don't really expect it to be any good. We could be wrong -- in fact, we're practically praying we are -- but given Snyder's previous track record, our hopes aren't exactly sky-high.
But one thing's for sure: Snyder is unqualified in his love for the original source material, and at the very least, he seems to be dedicated to making the Watchmen movie as faithful to the graphic novel as the format of the film will possibly allow. This could in and of itself be a big problem, leading fans to wonder why, if he's just going to film the panels verbatim, why anyone had to bother making the movie in the first place, but we do know this: no matter how bad Watchmen turns out to be, it could have been worse. Much, much, much worse.
How do we know, you ask? Because around 1989, screenplay hack Sam Hamm -- probably best known for having written the first two Batman movies directed by Tim Burton -- was commissioned (and paid pretty handsomely, if the rumors are true) to write a screenplay adaptation of Watchmen which, as buzz at the time had it, would be directed by Terry Gilliam. The resulting script was absolutely abysmal. It completely stripped the story of all its psychological and philosophical depth, turning it into a straightforward action-thriller without a iota of the qualities that made the comic great and stuffed to the gills with ridiculous, shopworn action movie tropes (the opening sequence, featuring a terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty, is hilariously bad in its triteness). It turned the characters -- those that remained, as almost all the comic's rich backstory is stripped away -- into lame caricatures, with the bleak, blackly funny moralist Rorschach transformed into a Wolverine parody making lame jokes about mimes. And worst of all, the ending, which in the book is a masterwork of moral ambiguity, is transformed into a sci-fi 'twist ending' so moronic that it's impossible to begin to describe. No matter how bad the Zack Snyder version might turn out, it could be worse, because it could be the Hamm script, which was blessedly never produced.
How do we know all this? Because we've read it. And now, so can you!
