My Brain Refuses to Function: Who Will Watch the Watchmen?

There's a Watchmen movie. They've just casted it and are getting ready to film, so it's considerably far along the path to escaping the 1st circle of development hell and doing the production limbo.

I'm a bit concerned because of the famous Alan Moore quote (He's, uh, the scary guy with the unhealthy fixation on the Tarot who wrote the thing for the non-comic geeks not reading this. To the comic geeks, what the hell was up with Promethea, anyway?). As the story goes, Terry Gilliam, the director who's done 12 Monkeys, Time Bandits, Brazil, and more in addition to being in Monty Python's Flying Circus (Played Patsy in the Holy Grail.). He's someone who's spent no small amount of time with complicated projects languishing in development hell – see the tragi-comic story of his Don Quixote movie – was interested in doing a Watchmen film and approached Mr. Moore to see what would be the best way to stage it. Moore's response? “Don't.”

Man can write, after all. The Watchmen is a text that's inherently wrapped up in the comic medium not to mention an incredibly dense piece of work. The actual story itself is little more than an admittedly well-crafted cold war polemic wrapped up in a deconstruction of superheroic trappings, it's nothing special. But the genius lays in the way the authors – Moore and the man, David Gibbons, who drew the thing – used the format and conventions of a comic book. It's such a superb work of craftsmanship. And it's hard to imagine it making the transition to the screen without major changes. I've seen scripts floating around, for example, that just take a cleaver to the elegant story of the book and turn it into, you know, Batman and Robin with a bigger body count. Ditching the cold war plot and the dark undertones of the original for a standard superhero caper film.

Those were earlier drafts of earlier projects, though. The current version is reportedly trying to stay true to the source material while still making the necessary tweaks for the change in mediums. And, well, special effects have come a long way. It's not like the story relies on the big set pieces but maybe they actually can make a giant naked man with blue skin strolling through the Vietnam jungle and raining down atomic fire on the godless communists look something other than ridiculous. So, maybe there's reason to be cautiously optimistic here. Oh wait, what's this?

It's going to be directed by the same guy who did 300.

Gah. I think my brain just collapsed in on itself.

Right. So, it's going to be another panel for panel lift like Sin City, then. Or as close to it as they can get. Yeah, I think instead of watching, I'll selectively alter my personal reality so that this movie was never made.