io9
While Director Zack Snyder is working away feverishly to complete his live-action adaptation of Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen graphic novel, we decided to take a look at the three versions of the film's script floating around on the etherwebs. This project has had several stalled-out development attempts since 1986, and reading through some of these it's easy to see why. Check out the breakdown of the top three below.
Note: hit the links to read these suckers for yourselves. The Alex Tse draft was out there at one point (we saved an older copy), so you might be able to find it by sifting the web. Or you could just put David Hayter's draft in a tumbler and give it a couple of shakes, it's roughly the same experience.
Sam Hamm, 1989: Hamm is probably best-known for writing Batman, also in 1989, so it's probably no small wonder that studios suits thought he'd be perfect to adapt Watchmen for Joel Silver at Fox. However, the resulting script is pretty much utter trash.
- In the opening scene, the Watchmen try to foil a terrorist scheme in the Statue of Liberty, although it results in the death of their teammate Captain Metropolis, and Lady Liberty gets blown up. Cue the government's war on "masks" and superheroes.
- The opening credits are described as dozens of watches floating around the screen. Lame.
- Adrian Veidt has developed smokeless cigarettes that are supposedly non-cancerous, while "cleaning your lungs at the same time." A far cry from the glass pipes in the original, plus it turns out Veidt was actually giving them cancer. Evil.
- Veidt has also created "Nostalgia," which isn't a perfume like in the comics, but rather an "anti-aging" Dick Clark-esque skin cream.
- The whole premise is built on the fact that the creation of Dr. Manhattan changed the world forever, so Veidt spends his time and millions trying to create a wormhole in time and space so he can kill Jon Osterman before he becomes the good doc. Dr. Manhattan stops him, but realizes he was right and goes back in time to prevent himself from existing, thereby changing the future.
- This "new world" (actually, our own present-day New York City) shimmers into existence around Dan (Night Owl), Laurie (Silk Spectre), and Rorschach, leaving them confused and wondering what happened. Fin.
- Lamest moment: EXT. SEAPORT - THAT MOMENT - DUSK
Ground level. From the midst of the bewildered CROWD we watch as the OWLSHIP and the CTU talk some serious trash:NIGHT OWL OVER OWLSHIP LOUDSPEAKER— "or we'll BLOW YOUR ASSES OUT OF THE SKY!"
CTU LOUDSPEAKER — "UNREGISTERED CRAFT. IDENTIFY YOURSELF."
OWLSHIP LOUDSPEAKER — "BABY . . . WE'RE A BLAST FROM THE PAST."
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David Hayter, 2003: Hayter was tapped to write the script once the project ended up at Paramount in turnaround from Fox. Hayter, who also wrote X-Men and X-Men 2 (and plays the voice of Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video games) stayed much closer to the source material than Hamm did, but he took some liberties as well.
- Dr. Manhattan is much more godlike in this script, creating a "magic mirror" for Laurie that can allow her to see any point in her past. This only seems to serve as a plot device so that we can see her fighting with The Comedian in the past.
- Dr. M also uses his abilities to give Laurie one of the lamest superpowers since Jubilee: she can now shoot a blue ball of energy from her fingers, slingshot-style.
- She uses this power to try and stop Adrian, but he catches the ball and pummels her. Not quite as dramatic as catching a bullet, is it?
- Instead of a vat-grown alien-tentacled telepath, Veidt fires a concentrated beam of radiation at orbital mirrors which reflect into New York City, killing 20 million people.
- Night Owl and Veidt square off in the end, and although Veidt beats the crap out of him, Night Owl still wins by tricking Veidt with an Owl-o-rang and killing him. Yes, really.
- Lamest moment: ADRIAN — "Why an Owl? I mean, assuming your intention is to intimidate the criminal element... What's so frightening about an owl?"
DAN — "I don't know, really. I guess it's because... No matter how hard you listen, you never hear them coming."
Dan DUCKS. Having circled the room, the OWL-WING ZOOMS OUT OF THE DARKNESS, OWL-FACE SCREECHING INTO FRAME —
— And STRIKES ADIAN THE IN THE CHEST, KNOCK HIM OFF HIS FEET. Adrian SLAMS to the ground, THE BOOMERANG'S LEFT WIND IMBEDDED IN HIS SOLAR PLEXUS. He wheezes blood.
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Alex Tse, 2006: Novice writer Tse was hired to come in and work on David Hayter's draft, which remains mostly intact. He changes a few things, but it still seems like it's mostly Hayter's script.
- Dr. Manhattan is seen as the "peacekeeper of the world," keeping all of the world's government in check, for better or for worse.
- Rorschach busts in on an army officer with a hooker, beats the crap out of him (and her) and takes his uniform. Later, he disguises himself as the officer, so he can enter Dr. Manhattan's army lab and tell him about The Comedian's death.
- Veidt impersonates Dr. Manhattan, and fires beams of concentrated... er, "big blue energy clouds" into key cities around the globe, killing three million people.
- Dan and Veidt square off again, but this time Dan crashes the Owl-Ship via remote control into Veidt, wounding him badly. You think he might survive, but as Laurie flies the ship out, she sets his body on fire. Whoops.
- Lamest moment: ADRIAN — "I have to say, I've always thought your choice of an owl was quite juvenile."
DAN — "Really? I've always liked owls..."
Adrian sees that Dan has pulled one last item from his belt. Adrian STEPS on Dan's WRIST, bones crunching. Dan's hand falls OPEN, revealing the OWL-SHIP REMOTE.
DAN (cont'd) — "... because you can never hear them coming."
BEHIND ADRIAN: FLOODLIGHTS BLAZE, targeting Adrian as the OWL-SHIP CRASHES THROUGH THE WINDOW and into Adrian and Dan.
Thankfully, both Hayter's and Tse's scripts keep Rorschach as the central character, complete with his journal voiceovers, his origin backstory told to the police psychiatrist, and the fateful envelope sent to The New Frontiersman offices. Also of note is that none of these scripts feature "The Tales of the Black Freighter," which Snyder is filming, although they do feature shots of a kid reading comic books near a newsstand.
At any rate, we'll be watching these Watchmen.
Comments
Isn't there some way we can vote this movie off the island? Some movies just don't need to be made.
As much as I'd like a good movie of Watchmen, part of me would like to see a movie of just "Tales of the Black Freighter" as an antidote to PoTC.
Right. Can't be done in three hours. A 12 hour miniseries for British TV like Terry Gilliam proposed, quite possible. But Joel Silver's a bastard. And Zak Snyder appears to be a hack. I've yet to see Dawn of the Dead, but 300 had maybe three good moments, all provided by Michael Fassbender. And while many claimed it was a great adaptation of Miller, I disagree. In Miller's, the camp was in the drawings, but the subject matter was deadly serious. In Snyder's the camp was in the subject matter and the visuals just failed to be as epic as he wanted them to be.
I interviewed Terry Gilliam, gosh, like ten years ago. He told me a Watchmen movie would be impossible to make. That it might work as a mini-series.
@princessstacey: Couldn't agree more. And let's face it: even a miniseries would probably turn out disappointing, although it /would/ open up the possibility of a Rorschach spin-off show...
Part of me is glad that Snyder is including the Black Freighter bits, for completeness sake, and another part of me is worried he is including things like that just as fan service and not because they will make a good movie.
I think so much of Watchmen is based around the fact that it IS a comic book that a movie that is 100% faithful might not work. The BF is a comic book because there are real superheroes so you can see them on the news. In a movie, even a movie geared towards comic book fans, I am not sure how he will handle that.
In my head it somehow works if the kid is addicted to a pirate serial in a movie theater, or even a cartoon.
I hope this movie doesn't suck, that is all I can say.
@extracrispy: Of course the crazy man who can't get financing is the ONLY ONE who understands what it would take to make this into a film. Poor Terry. How I love the big-mouthed genius.
Other than rehashing very old news, I'm confused at the point of this post. If you're going to tell us things already known and revealed by countless other sties, how about the latest casting news? What about the fact that Gibbons is onboard with the Tse script? Or, my personal vote, tell us all about the Lost/Watchmen similarities. If this site is going to stick around, the criteria for what makes something worthy of writing about must be raised.
@princessstacey: Seconded, it's a 12-part comic for a reason.
@ex_ea_slave: We hadn't seen anyone comparing all three versions of the different scripts, so we decided we'd do that, pulling out some of the major things that set them apart. We've talked about Watchmen casting already, plus the Heroes/Watchmen similarities (at least from Season One).
Maybe we'll look into the Lost/Watchmen connections, that's a good idea. Thanks for the feedback!
I say they can this and make a 12 part TV miniseries of Lost Girls instead.
@IntoAshes: I'd watch it.
Le sigh. Sounds like Batman and Robin, with the radiation offa satelites and all. And the whole "Why a bat?, er owl?" bit.
He's probably been driven crazy because of his reputation as box office poison. Except that prior to Lost In La Mancha, only one of his films failed to make back it's budget. And he's branded as unmarketable. Disgusting really. And Weinstein butchered, froze, and re-butchered whatever Brothers Grimm might have been.
No matter how many times they revise the script, the movie will just suck. It was made to be a comic book, and to turn it into anything else would destroy the story. Sure you could fit in all the major plot details, but if you cut anything at all out from the original book you'll lose the character developement that makes it so excellent. It doesn't help that Zach Snyder, who obviously doesn't understand anything about subtlety (fucking bone-saw arms in 300) is at the helm of a project this complex. He speciallizes in stupid, over-the-top action movies, and that's just not what Watchmen is. Of course, movie studios would not buy a drama about superheroes, so that's exactly what his Watchmen will be. Hell, on the movie's official website they describe it as "A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure." If you could possibly describe Watchmen like that, then it is obvious to me that you have never read it.
God I hope the writer's strike kills this thing dead. There's a good chance too: if ever a movie was going to need a million script doctors and re-writes this is it.
God these sound awful. I don't want any of them to get made. Why not just go whole-hog into the shit barrel and cast Schwarzenegger as Rorschach who will shoot dozens of villains in the face while making terrible quips like, "The thing about inkblots is that you can never predict what they will be." And Dr. Manhatten can be Woody Allen. And Ozymandias can be a coked-up Jack Black and Nite Owl can be a CGI Peter Sellars.
Why not?
The pictures of the set from the website are amazing. The level of detail is taking me back to the hours spent poring over the original artwork. Snark all you want, but this tells me the folks involved are giving it their all.
I am IN.
@Tiger_Tanaka: Yeah, the photos do look great. Believe me, I want this to rock. Let's just hope it does.
RHorseman: It's been shooting. Writer's strike won't kill it, it will just kill a guild writer from re-writing it as they go.
The art direction and photography will be fucking amazing no doubt. So was LOTR's. Film still sucked.
Well,I only read the Sam Hamm script. I didn't find it awful, except for his depiction of Veidt. The ending idea about Manhatten is arguably better than Moore's comic. Moore's idea of a mutant invented monster bent on invasion would have only worked for about 6 months before it would have collapsed. Sam Hamms solution made more sense in a lot of ways. The airship chase was fun, but he didn't get rorschach quite right, and I don't understand what the big reason for giving Laurie cancer or the momentous cure. It seemed uneccessary. But not horrible.
Reading drafts of all three, I'd have to agree that Hamm's script is a complete trainwreck and that Hayter and Tse's versions are actually pretty good. Hayter did the seemingly impossible by creating a structure that is actually both faithful to the original story and that works as a filmic narrative.
I think a lot of the naysaying comments here are pretty reactionary. The links are right there and the Tse script isn't hard to track down either, why not just give them a read? You might be surprised.
I'd heard a lot of negative things about Tse's version, but I found myself liking it the best - the dialogue and other tweaks really improve the tone and characters and ditches a lot of the hokier stuff that carried over in Hayter's draft. I find the progressive move closer to the original source material all good signs (and as a continuing trend, especially w/ Snyder's decisions to make it a period piece, bringing it back to the original setting).
The only thing I can really fault is the hokey Veidt/Dreiberg fight. I'm not sure why "comic" movies always have to end with ridiculous fist-fights (remember the Sandman script?) where things get wrapped up in a bow no matter how antithetical it is to the whole point of it all. Other genres of films don't seem to be hamstrung by this. Did anyone say to the Coen Brothers "yeah, No Country For Old Men was good, but why not have Tommy Lee Jones go mano a mano w/ Javier Bardem and knock him out at the end."
Since Snyder has made other changes and at least from the visual production angle has been extremely faithful to the source material, I'm hoping the final cut drops the some of the silliness at the end.
Anyway, chalk me up as a skeptic who's now pretty excited to see how the movie turns out.
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