From Hell earned a 2.5 star rating on the vibrometer on the strength of Johnny Depp’s performance alone. The notices for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are pretty negative. Bringing Alan Moore’s writing to the big screen seems to be a big problem. Which brings us to the question at hand:
Is it possible to adapt The Watchmen to the big screen? Cinescape reports that the project has been “in the lowest basement of development hell” for some time, with Terry Gilliam no longer attached to the project. David Hayter, writer of the X-Men movies, was attached at last report, which was two years ago, which is at least moderately encouraging.
My opinion is that it’s probably unfilmable, although Peter Jackson’s success in filming Lord of the Rings, which I also thought was unfilmable, brings that judgement into question. I think if anyone could do it, it is Terry Gilliam, who has an avowd love for the comic, although that means the budget would be super-huge, which is probably unavoidable under any circumstances. The subject matter, especially after September 11, 2001, means that most studios would stay away from the movie like it was radioactive. My preference would be a cast of unknowns for the Watchmen. which makes the big budget thing even more far fetched.
So, Dopers, whaddaya think? Is it possible? Who should direct? Who should star? Can it be done? Is it even desireable to try?
I don’t see it needed all that big a budget; other than Dr. Manhattan, the heros are just normal people, so you don’t need any fancy special effects.
The hurdles are big ones, though:
Length. Too much for a single film, though a 12-episode TV miniseries might be possible.
Obscurity. LOTR was massively popular, even outside of its core group. Watchman is only known to a small number of comic book fans.
Background. It will be very difficult to get people to understand the idea that this is an alternate history with superheroes. The Gunga Diners, for instance, won’t make much sense to a lot of people.
Lack of Action. Successful superhero films have a lot of fight scenes and action. Watchmen has few. The people who read comics will be bored and the people who might like the characters and themes won’t show up, and are probably too small to support any film.
Ambiguous ending. Moviegoers hate films where the ending is left open ended. They want the hero to win.
I’m afraid any adaptation of Watchmen will be dumbed down into a “thrill ride” film due to marketing concerns. A TV miniseries might be able to do justice, but it would take a lot of luck for that to happen.
I’m sure that it will be every bit as high-quality social commentary and psychological drama and as true to the source material as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is.
watsonwil, that might be doable. I think the key is to bring the cost down to a level that someone would be willing to take a chance on it.
Here’s a thought: Put Terry Gilliam in charge of the animated mini-series. He’s an experienced animator, after all, and that means he can be as crazy as he wants to be without running up the budget too much.
“From Hell” wasn’t bad… but then, “From Hell” was a detective story and political thriller, and these stories have definite endings, definite climaxes, even if the bad guy doesn’t quite get it the way we thought he shooda.
“Watchmen” is remarkably bleak, addresses issues the average moviegoer wouldn’t get for a minute, takes place in an alternate reality that unfolds AS THE STORY progresses (in the beginning, you have NO idea that it’s an alternate 1985 in which Nixon is still President)… I mean, it’s way different, you know?
It’s a story about how the existence of superheroes – ONE superhero, in particular – warps and twists an ordinary world, one just like ours, to the point where it’s durn near a foreign country.
It’s THOUGHTFUL, and somehow, I just don’t think today’s moviemakers are interested in a project like that. It would take someone like Terry Gilliam to pull it off, and he’d have to be allowed completely free reign, with no guarantees for the studio or backers that it would ever make a cent… I mean, it’s a given that this just would NOT play well in Peoria.
Actually, I’ve heard some good things about League of Ex. Gentlemen. Although no one says it’s particularly close to the source, as I’ve said more than once, anyone who complains about an adaptation of an Alan Moore work because it strays too far from the source material needs a better understanding of the concept of irony.
Watchmen is too delicately constructed to be filmed. But it was impossible to adapt Robt. Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men for the same reason – that doesn’t mean the movie wasn’t really good; it just didn’t cover near as much as the book. A good Watchmen film might come down the pike one day, but it’d have to be judged on its own merits. No matter what it’s like, if the criterion for success is faithfulness, the fim is doomed to failure – but that shouldn’t be the criterion for success.
Actually, I’ve heard some good things about League of Ex. Gentlemen. Although no one says it’s particularly close to the source, as I’ve said more than once, anyone who complains about an adaptation of an Alan Moore work because it strays too far from the source material needs a better understanding of the concept of irony.
Watchmen is too delicately constructed to be filmed. But it was impossible to adapt Robt. Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men for the same reason – that doesn’t mean the movie wasn’t really good; it just didn’t cover near as much as the book. A good Watchmen film might come down the pike one day, but it’d have to be judged on its own merits. No matter what it’s like, if the criterion for success is faithfulness, the fim is doomed to failure – but that shouldn’t be the criterion for success.
After having just seen League , I honestly hope they never film Watchmen , or, for that matter, The Sandman , another possible adaptation floating around.
What RealityChuck said. Word for word. Or Word to your momma. Whichever works.
Re Sandman, Jon Peters is the producer holding the reins. He wants to make him a conventional superhero and have him fight a villain at the end, a la Superman II. Peters is also the wingnut who was in charge of Wild Wild West. He’s quite possibly the worst big-budget producer in Hollywood history. He gives Golan/Globus a run for their money.
I’m normally kind of a pacifistic type who doesn’t wish violence on other people, but Jon Peters needs to be disemboweled by a wolverine.
Two other things: much of Watchmen is a commentary on the history of superhero comics, and most people have no knowledge of that subject. The average person doesn’t know the Golden Age from the Golden Arches, after all.
Also, Watchmen exploits a form of Cold War paranoia that no longer exists in that exact form. Sure, you could still have it set back in 1985, but it just wouldn’t feel the same seeing it today. Or you could try to update it and make it play off of fears of terrorism or something. But then it wouldn’t be Watchmen.
Although I see your point, Wumpus, I first read The Watchmen in October, 2001, and I found the atmosphere of paranoia and apocalypse resonated perfectly. Undefined fear, big, bad things happening in New York City, faked crises with tragic results, blind dependance on authority and strength having horrible negative effects on America and the world–I can see plenty of potential for a resonant story here.
You’re right that most people–me included–don’t really know comic history, but I think with all of the superhero movies in the last few years the audience is, or soon will be, ready for some Moore-style deconstruction of the genre. It’s clear that the Watchmen story couldn’t survive the adaptation process intact–why not admit that and try to do something for the movies in the same spirit? Maybe Spike Jonez and Charlie Kaufman would be the right director/writer team to tackle the project.
I have a friend who, for a screenwriting class, tackled the idea of a Watchmen movie. He’s not a writer by trade, but he did a far better job adapting the material than Sam Hamm did in the 1980s. He kept the plot – though he lost most of the sideplots about the psychiatrist, the lesbians, the newspaper vendor, etc (though we saw all of them repeatedly, we never follow them) – and the quixotic ending. And he got it all in, fairly serviceably, in 135 pages – that’s 2 hours, 15 minutes on screen.
Some polish and a bit more exposition to explain the origins of the Watchmen universe and you’d have a pretty damn decent script for a flick.
So the material is filmable. And it can be made to fit in some approximation of a film’s length. Now, budget, on the other hand…
In the new book Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, Terry Gilliam writes an essay wherein he says that it’s unfilmable as a two hour feature film, that it might fly as a five-part cable miniseries but funding for that would be unlikely.
You know those crappy movies you wish had never been made? They could make WATCHMEN into one of those, no problem. As for the other kind of movie–no way. Think of all the things you like about WATCHMEN and imagine an adaptation that featured maybe 80% of them. Until Alan Moore decides to get off the pot and write a screenplay himself, I really wish Hollywood would just leave his stuff alone.
Gilliam has an undeserved reputation when it comes to budgets. Every single movie he’s worked on, with one exception, has come in on time and on or under budget. He may be an iconoclast, but he recognizes he has a responsibility to the financiers who allow him to do what he does, and if he’s a jerk about it he won’t get to do it any more.
The only time the budget got out of control, on Baron Munchausen, it was largely the fault of an inexperienced loose-cannon producer who came in late in the process when the relationship with the original producer fell apart. The new guy didn’t bother supervising certain areas of the project, preferring to devote his energies to a few specific questions (he tried to get, and almost got, Marlon Brando to play Vulcan). In addition, he didn’t treat the budget process realistically; he kept firing accountants who reported bigger numbers than he wanted to hear. He also had the bad habit of bragging about how cool the project was in the press, and how proud he was to be involved with such a “big” production, which meant all the locals tried to soak the producers for everything they could get. Gilliam’s own words:
It gets worse. There was an accident on set, a crane collapse, that caused a week-long delay, which was convenient because it let the costumer catch up, except that later the big-mouth producer bragged he’d deliberately caused the mishap in order to buy that time, which meant the insurance people refused to pay. And then, at the end, with no money to cushion production delays (the costumes got shipped to the wrong location at one point, for example), and with a replacement of leadership back at the studio, the film was shut down for a few days… and the producer disappeared. Just vanished. Poof. He turned up again later, publicizing himself in interviews as the producer without taking responsibility for any of the problems. Basically, it was a big clusterfuck, and it wasn’t Gilliam’s fault. This one producer took them all for a ride.
The most recent Gilliam film, the Don Quixote film, was to be done for $75 million on European financing, also blew up for reasons beyond Gilliam’s control. See the documentary Lost in La Mancha for the story (and for a heartbreaking glimpse of the small amount of completed footage, including Johnny Depp talking to a fish). In Hollywood terms, $75 million is a mid-sized budget; the latest Terminator flick cost $100 million more than that.
Gilliam is not irresponsible with his money. The reputation is not deserved. Just wanted to make that clear, in case anybody was wondering. If somebody gives him X dollars, and a professional crew that isn’t going to screw him over, that’s what he’ll spend in the end.
I still agree that Watchmen is largely unfilmable for other reasons, though.