While traveling down the hallway to The Comedian's apartment (Edward Blake, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the first thing you see is the address, 3001. Nice nod to 300, Snyder. At the New York press screening, Zack did mention that not everything is going to be that obvious.

After the attacker busts into Edward Blake's abode, there's a scuffle that pans across the place, revealing the glorious Chrysler Building in the reflection of the glass walls before Blake goes careening right through it. This high rise is treasure trove of Watchmen and 80s memorabilia, it's littered with little details. When costumed adventurer Rorschach pops inside for a look around, you get to see right inside Blake's closet. Amongst everything else is a framed picture of the Minutemen, and the Comedian's old gun with the inscription "To Edward Blake With Gratitude" on the side which was presented to him from President Nixon. Old Nixon didn't resign in this reality, in fact 1985 will be his 5th term as President because he repealed the 22nd Amendment in 1975, so he can be Prez forever.

To the right of the closet (actually throughout the whole apartment) there is a piece of what I'm assuming is Patrick Nagel art, which is unbelievable. Thank god that Zack Snyder knows that even in alternate realities, we still need artists to design the covers of Duran Duran albums.

Here is a closer look at the Minutemen pictures inside the closet, and a pin up of Sally Jupiter which adorns one of his walls.

Now we see The Comedian earn his special guns from the government. In a flashback, Blake and Dr. Manhattan fight in Vietnam. See Blake's delight as he burns his enemy alive? He's a sad, sad man. The legs behind him, that's Dr. Manhattan super sized, who then points to his victims and causes them to burst into gooey little bits. In this alternate reality the Viet Cong surrender in two months.

Moving on, the cast is now at The Comedian's funeral. Dan Dreiberg, or the second Nite Owl, now a little pudgy from the lack of crime fighting, flicks The Comedian's insignia into the grave, but note when the American Flag is draped across his coffin if you pay crazy people attention to detail you notice that there are 51 stars on the flag, because in Watchmen's 1985, Vietnam is a state, thanks to Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian's involvement.

New York's Times Square. Note the Veidt ad in the middle of the city. Seconds later, some sort of electric bomb goes off. Is this the replacement for the squid? Is this what kills a large portion of New York city's civilians?

Next Adrian Veidt fights a man who is no longer wielding a walkie talkie (thanks, censors) in his pimped-out Egyptian-themed pad.

Call it a case of censorship gone horribly wrong. In the trailer Dr. Manhattan's exposed wang is completely blurred out. This is the moment when Jon Osterman appears for the first time in his new blue form, and he should be naked. Was this an attempt to get bloggers to stop posting pictures of his manliness all over the internet? If so, too late. But more importantly, why? Billy Crudup's going to fully exposed for most of the movie anyways, why hide it now?

Laurie Juspeczyk (daughter to Sally Jupiter) beams to Dr. Manhattan's Mars pad to plead with him, and try and convince him to save humanity.

Rorsach gets cornered by the cops and takes the opportunity to plug a little Veidt hair spray, by lighting the SWAT team on fire.

The streets of New York city begin to riot, and Nite Owl jumps to the ground looking an awful lot like the Dark Knight doing a little van jumping.

Nuclear explosions burst about Dan and Laurie, but fear not, this is just from Dan's pervy dream about little Laurie (who was cast surprisingly young in this film). But, unlike in the book, this scene is pretty foreshadowing should they do away with the squid attack in the end and instead use a sonic bomb. But the dream itself is very indicative of the Cold War fear that's still going on in this alternate 1985. After the country's greatest weapon (Dr. Manhattan) flees to Mars, it's only a matter of time before all out nuclear war took place as the relations between the US and Russia in this future were incredibly strained.

Why so serious, Nite Owl? Well, probably because what he's screaming about isn't snow, it is in fact the scattered specks of a beloved friend. Which one? Now that is hard to tell. Many have speculated that Snyder may have changed this ending as well.

As those who've read the original series know, neither of the story's two superteams are actually called "the Watchmen" - There are the original Minutemen, and then the more modern Crimebusters - So why is someone in the trailer telling the audience that "the Watchmen are... over"? CHUD asked director Zack Snyder what was with the curious voiceovered appearance of the word:

The original [team] we called the Minutemen, as per the graphic novel. We never exactly say whether or not in the more modern version we call them the Watchmen/Crimebusters. We loosely called them Watchmen as more of a the symbolic name, more than anything else.

A symbolic name that just so happens to help newcomers to the story understand what's going on, so it's a win-win for all involved. Unless, of course, you're the kind of person who's still bothered by the idea that all of the Tales Of The Black Freighter cutaways won't be in the movie...

Zack Snyder Explains Who These Watchmen Are [CHUD]

Watchmen comes out on March 6, 2009.

[Yahoo]

Zack Snyder's live adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen hits theaters on March 6, 2009.

Visiting Australia, Snyder showed off some footage from Watchmen, and sat down for an interview with Dark Horizons. And of course, they asked about the roiling controversy over the Portland screenings, where people saw a version that didn't include the famous "giant squid" ending. Here's what Snyder says:

The squid was not in the movie when I got the script, the squid was never in any draft that I saw. My point is only that there was this elegant solution to the squid problem that I kind of embraced. I'm a fan of the thing as much as anyone, I was saying what are we going to do about this before I even read the script." Was that solution multiple atomic explosions as some have said? "I won't say exactly but... Dr. Manhattan has a certain energy signature, it's clearly his thing...so you know.

Did you know there was a "squid problem"? Apparently there was. The thing about Dr. Manhattan's "energy signature" jibes with the reports, from the screenings, that instead of creating a fake alien attacker, Ozymandias causes some nuclear explosions and frames Dr. Manhattan for them.

Also, Snyder "shot down reports of multiple endings," says Dark Horizons. "They only filmed the one."

But fans who fixate on the squid are missing the point, Snyder insists:

The fans, god love 'em, they're all up in arms about the squid. What they should be up in arms about are things like shooting the pregnant woman, 'God is real and he's American', whether THAT's in the movie. That's my point of view, maybe I'm crazy.

He says the new ending is still true to the characters and keeps the "moral imperative" from the original graphic novel.

Meanwhile, Snyder admits he's nervous about how well the film will do at test screenings. He's gone out of his way to warn Warner Bros. that this won't be a slam dunk with test audiences, the way his earlier movie 300 was.

Some people are going to go, "what the fuck is this?", And I go, "That's okay." That's the thing that you fight... The one thing that was cool was that anyone who had read the graphic novel who was at the screening rated the film "Excellent." For me, I'm like, "I'm done."

Reading between the lines, it sounds like maybe people at the first test screening who hadn't read the original graphic novel didn't rate the film "Excellent"? Just guessing here. Also, Snyder is especially worried about Asian audiences, because Japan didn't even like The Dark Knight.

Also, you may have gotten the impression from the trailers and early footage that Watchmen is a non-stop ninja-tastic slugfest with crazy action scenes. Actually, says Snyder, there are very few action scenes in the film. There's the scene of the Comedian fighting for his life, early on, which does last longer than in the comic, because it lets us see what a badass the Comedian is, so we realize that an ordinary assailant would have had no chance against him. And then Nite Owl's brutal alley fight, which is super graphic, including a compound arm fracture and blood spraying everywhere — which is interspersed with Dr. Manhattan's TV interview.

Other tidbits: Snyder says the "director's cut," including the animated "Black Freighter" comic, will clock in at three-and-a-half hours. He wants the standalone "Black Freighter" DVD to be a collector's item, maybe including some kind of movie prop, that you can put on your shelf. And he says people have been puzzled by the inclusion of the song "99 Luftballons" by Nena in the movie's soundtrack, not realizing that the song is about nuclear war. The Comedian's funeral is a huge set piece, and then we follow Dan through the riots, the Comedian's tour in Vietnam with Dr. Manhattan, and Adrian at crimebusters headquarters. Snyder's son, who played the young Leonidas in 300, cameos as a young Rorschach. And finally, the new Watchmen trailer, which shows before Quantum Of Solace this weekend, is a bit more story-based, pushing the mystery of who's killing the costumed heroes. It includes people saying things like "We were supposed to make the world a better place," and "What happened to the American dream?" [Dark Horizons]

This little mini documentary is actually jam packed with importantWatchmen moments that appear to include Hooded Justice saving Sally from the infamous attack and Laurie and Dan getting jumped by the street ruffians. And you can actually hear Sally Jupiter arguing with Laurie about whether of not The Comedian was such a bad guy. Also, there is a break down of the prison riot fight scene where Malin Akerman runs through her stage fight both in and out of costume (pretty cool making-the-sausage kind of moment). Watchmen will be released March 6, 2009.

Watchmen Exclusive: Girls Kick Ass

Rich Johnston's Lying In The Gutters column is reporting that the preview's climax - which saw the comic's pan-dimnsional squid replaced by a New York destroyed by a nuclear explosion - may have been a test by the moviemakers to see whether or not they could get away with deviating from the source material:

I'm told that this screening was intentionally leaked to the fan press - with the exact time and place posted online with details of how to evade the security. The intent is to gauge fan reaction to a squidless ending for Watchmen and see what they can get away with, believing it to be more suitable for a more mainstream audience. The FX for the squid has been completed however.

If true, this is an interesting development - and one that may implicate Collider.com as a studio patsy, if not willing participant in the experiment.

We'll wait and see what reports come from the second screening to see whether the squid makes its reappearance.

Lying In The Gutters [Comic Book Resources]

The new trailer for Snyder's Watchmen that was played at this years Scream Awards was later released on HD and low and behold there was Dr. Manhattans blue wonder.

One of the many things I'm loving about the Watchmen live action movie is that they're embracing Dr. Manhattan's "character." Good on you Zack.

Watchmen will open on March 6.

[via Newsarama]

Moore has cited Ah Pook Is Here, the 1970 collaboration of Malcolm McNeill and William S. Burroughs, as a Watchmen primary source (you can see an image from it at right, above). Ah Pook Is Here never made it into the marketplace as a graphic novel, but the comic did appear as The Unspeakable Mr. Hart in Britain's Olympus magazine. The image of the Mayan Death God resembles a certainly godly figure in the Watchmen universe: Dr. Manhattan. The art and tone supplied a mythological depth for the creation of a God. Moore has referenced Burroughs' "idea of repeated symbols laden with meaning" as a feature he wished to embody.

The British psycho-scifi series The Prisoner gets a direct shout-out when Rorschach mutters "Be seeing you" - a recurring line on the show - as he leaves through a window. The production motif pops up in Nite Owl's Owlship, the Archimedes:

The Prisoner's coy tone and mysterious plot twists are found in the dark humor of the original comic - not an area that Snyder is particularly known for. So we may not be seeing much Prisoner in the film version of the movie.

Rorshach's interrogation by a psychologist in Issue 6 is told through the journal of his interrogator. Such a device might be too clunky for film, resulting in something like the opening scene of Blade Runner. The struggles of both interrogator and subject for identity are common themes here, and the lonely Owlship moving through the the city landscape also resonates with the Ridley Scott film.

The second Nite Owl is played by Patrick Wilson in the film. His desperate post-hero plight recalls Travis Bickle's crazed loneliness in 1970s deathtrip classic Taxi Driver. The long pan across Bickle's sad phone call in the film's middle, as though the camera was ashamed to watch, recalls this depiction of Dan Dreiberg in Issue 1:

Snyder's has mentioned the seediness of Taxi Driver and David Fincher's Seven as inspirations for the gritty element of Watchmen, all the better to wear off the superhero gloss.

Snyder said he had a meeting with the studio early on, where they shared their early "Hollywood" vision for the Watchmen movie. It would have been an updated George Bush-era film, where the Minutemen team had been hunting down terrorists. But Snyder's love for Nixon's Watchmen involvement brought him back to the table, asking Warner Brothers to trust him that 1985 is the right way to start the movie, and "maybe we should just leave it the way it is."

But before we got to hear more about the studio's attempted revamps, we saw some footage from the movie:

While it's hard to judge an unfinished movie from just a few minutes, the main things I was stuck with upon leaving were the colors and the look to each character. Even when covered in blood (or someone's innards) the characters sets and scenes were all still striking and iconic-looking.

The movie starts with a McLaughlin Group-type talk show on TV. There is a discussion about whether or not Dr. Manhattan's presence is escalating the strain on foreign policy. The Comedian (old and warn) switches the television to a show where "Unforgettable" begins to play. Just as he's about to relax the door is thrown open and The Comedian is in his deadly fight with the "bad guy." The fight scenes are just as painstakingly crafted as the sets in Watchmen. With each blow (all to the tune of "Unforgettable"), you greeted to a slow-mo pan out shot that honestly makes the whole thing much more enjoyable. Yet if this continues to happen throughout the entirety of the film I can see it getting tedious.

The fight continues, and you all know how it ends — bloody. Zack's Watchmen is blooooody, but wonderfully so. With each drop of red this movie is setting itself apart from the one-liner superhero movies of yesterday and reminding us that these heroes can and will die. Even bits from the trailer of exploding soldiers in the Vietnam war that appeared to be shiny bursts (above) were replaced with dark blood from Dr. Manhattan's victims. The same goes for the fight scene in the prison which we touched on earlier.

Cut to the opening credits playing the way too obvious and too long "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan. But besides the extra-long song the viewer is treated to a montage pictures and video showing the creation of the Minutemen superhero team. If you need a historical point of reference, Watchmen's opening credits has 1,000 of them. Ranging from Silhouette replacing the sailor in the infamous nurse-kissing V-Day black and white still, to Ozymandias standing outside of Studio 54.

Finally we got to see the creation of Dr. Manhattan and listen to the inner monologue of the "god" himself. Watching him turn from Dr. Jonathan Osterman to blue beast was amazing. The detail that they went into ripping out each little organ was shocking. The appearing-reappearing floating circulatory system that floats about days later is forever burned in my eyes. I really see why this character is Snyder's favorite.

Overall there was a lot of stuff that was a little "I get it — the Watchmen are a part of history". But besides that and a few scoring changes it was gorgeous, the characters were so lovely that even their teeth were sparkling in the Snyder film. Dr. Manhattan's back story alone (just the simple day-to-day life of a 1950s) man was strikingly detail oriented. So I'm excited to see what Snyder is going to do with the real meat of the movie. Which he addresses in the Q&A with reporters:

Q: Can you assure us that the ending won't puss out?

ZS: The ending does not puss out. I will assure you of that. In that meeting, in that same war on terror meeting. There was a different ending.The moral checkmate that is the end of the movie, to me that's the movie. That's the point of the graphic novel. I'm not going to spoil it, but the "bad guy" who's not really the bad guy but lets call him the bad guy because it's easier to say it that way. The bad guy has an evil plan and you might call it that, he does something really horrific. But at the end, the question of whether or not this was the right thing to do and the way all of the characters have to react to that is really sort of beautifully constructed so that the question that it poses is really the crux of the movie. I can assure you that in that first movie, that was not the why of the movie. The why was to run around and fight in rubber suits and beat the shit out of each other, which has also got merit, I will not say it doesn't but that's not why I make a movie.

Q: Where does Watchmen fit in the comic book movies with Iron Man etc.?

ZS: I think that question is related to the graphic novel. It's where the graphic novel lives in the graphic book world. Its place, in my opinion anyway, in the comic book world... Here's the thing also: Iron Man, Batman, those two movies in particular, they're not based on graphic novels per say. Those characters get to go on adventures based on a director or a writer coming up with one for them to go on. And there are political and or creative reasons why they did something that are completely valid and awesome, but they don't serve any piece of literature like Watchmen does. I have an obligation to that material and I think that material, the last thing it wants to do is send its characters out on an adventure in the classic Hollywood sense. It's completely deconstructed in what we've been trained to think a superhero is.

DG: I think another example as to why this is being made now is it kind of stands in relation to the other superhero movies that the comic book did to the superhero comics at the time. In other words the average movie-goer understands superheroes. They know about secret identities and alcaves and nuclear powered heroes. They come in and see it and immediately know what it's about. And just like I like to think that the readers of comics in the 1980s were, they will be finding questions being asked that they weren't thinking of before. Like basically if there was a Dr. Manhattan what would the world be like? If there really were superheroes, what would they be like?

ZS: It's come full circle. My mother knows the origins stories to superheroes she has no business knowing. She's just been to the movies a lot. The average movie goer has the back story.

Q: Some people have been nervous that the movie would be simply panel by panel but I see now that may not be the case?

ZS: The book has a luxurious pace that is awesome. But I knew that I had to get some information out at the beginning of the movie. There were things that I had to do that were different. So there are going to be differences in the basic structuring. But there are things that I like, that I wanted to keep. Like in the title sequence I remember reading about Dollar Bill getting his cape stuck in a revolving door, and thinking, "gosh I want to see that." The Incredibles made a whole movie out of it and I thought it was worth a shot, you know. Those were the things that I was inspired by that were in the supplemental material that maybe there wasn't a frame for and I wanted to try and work it in. Just like Wally Weaver plays a couple different parts, he takes a lot of the weight of the scientific community. But that line he takes Milton Glass' part as well. He says "I never said that Superman was real and he's American, I said God was real and he's American," I always thought that was a really cool line. I wanted that to be on the poster, but they weren't into that by the way [Laughs].

DG: Stragely enough if they had stuck to everything I drew I would be very disappointed because I think it's important that it stands as a good movie. And a good movie isn't just a literal translation of every single comic book panel. I really loved the things like with Wally Weaver where things have been amalgamated that had been made much better for the film.

Q: What was the hardest stuff to get into the movie?

ZS: The hardest stuff to get into the movie was the stuff I liked the best. I remembered when we started talking about the movie and if you're familiar with the book, the Comedian's funeral and Manhattan on Mars, and some of the Rorschach flashbacks — those three are the corner stones of the beginning, middle and end of the movie... But those three sequences and the Comedian's funeral in particular were difficult. Everyone is internalizing, it's raining and they're thinking about how the Comedian affected their lives and they're flashing to that moment. It's very particular, although those are kind of the whys as to why I did this movie. Whenever I was debating on doing this movie I would think about the Comedian's funeral, on Mars and Rorschach and I gotta do it. Those things for me is as cool as it gets. As far as things I couldn't get in, the whole detective story — those two detectives that are trying to figuring out why these people are killing each other — those are the things we had to leave out. Although you do see them in the movie, just not their whole story.

Q: What's the status on the Black Freighter?

ZS: In Watchmen there is a parallel pirate story that kind of parallels the Watchmen story. We are creating it as an animated film and it is our hope that on the DVD that we can put those sequences into the DVD so they are woven right into the the actual story line of the movie, in the theatrical release that won't be the case. But we're going to release a DVD at the time of the theatrical release there is going to be a DVD that has a mock documentary on it called "Under The Hood" that is a TV show from '85 where this guy looks back to '72 (I believe) which is the year that [superhero autobiography] Under the Hood was published, and that reporter had done a news story about the publishing of the book and is now doing a retrospective on what had happened to all the characters. So it includes a lot of stuff form the body of the book. It will also include the animated short on it. The one movie will be the Ultimate Black Freighter Watchmen movie which will be 3 hours and something, 25 minutes. Who can say?

Q: Zack you've done Frank Miller and Alan Moore — is there a Neil Gaiman movie in your future?

ZS: It's pretty funny. I didn't mean it I really didn't. It's a coincidence, but he's good.

(I couldn't find that still, but this interior of The Comedian's home has pin-up of Sally Jupiter on the wall)

Q: What did you put in this movie for the fans?

ZS: You know it's more an Easter Eggy thing than it is a filming technique that if you play the movie backwards [you see something.] "I'm good, but I'm not that good." But there's tons of that stuff. Even in the shot where the Comedian punches his hand through the wall. If you look at that shot on his bedside table, even though it's only a second long, there is a picture of Laurie torn out of a magazine where Manhattan is torn out of it, and it's put into a frame. And if you know the story that makes sense. It's literally like 12 frames long. There's a lot of that.

Q: What was the budget of the film?

ZS: I can't say the number because there's lots of laws apparently. But I will say, there wasn't anything that we wanted to film that we didn't shoot.

Q: Speaking of Easter Eggs was that a 3001 on the Comedian's door [from the footage]?

ZS: Yeah, there are subtler ones than that [Laughs].

There is a rabid and vocal fan base for the graphic novel that support the graphic novel and may be against the motion picture or the changes you'd make to support the motion picture. And I always say look, No Country For Old Men I guarantee you is changed twice as much or three times as much as we changed Watchmen. But there is no vocal group of anti No Country For Old Men purists. That are going to kill the Coens. Although Cormac McCarthy is awesome, so there's grounds. That's a difficult thing I just treat it like a great book that you're making into a movie.

Q: Dave do you think some day you could convince Alan [Moore] to watch it? And in your heart of hearts what do you think he would think?

DG: I don't think it's my job to convince Alan to do anything. I wouldn't even go there. I'd rather not be drawn into hypothetical speculation about Alan's thought process.

So how does one get down to the business that is Dr. Manhattan's business? Snyder explained:

“It was a weird process. We made a wedge. That’s a visual effects term. It was done in quick time. We would scroll the length up and down. And we wrapped it around a frame. Of course we were worried about the rating. Yeah. We are still nervous about it. It wasn’t so much about taking any inches off. It was more about how many times you get to see him. We have an R rating right now. So they’ve seen him. Maybe, partly because he is CG, they thought it was okay. It was a really practical decision to make it that length. Then we put him in the thong, which is CG. We basically took his outfit from the book. But, as in the book, we took it off him. Because he just lets it go. He certainly lets it all hang out.

Let's address the ridiculousness that is a Watchmen 2 movie. Sure a few actors said, "why not?" — which does not mean it's happening. But if it does, Snyder is out. Thank god he knows his limits.

Warner Brothers is moving forward with the promotion of the film, and despite the impending lawsuit from Fox, it's all just business as usual.

Great but most importantly how long is the Watchmen movie? According to Movie Web, about two hours and forty-three minutes. So for those of you thinking about drinking liquids beforehand — don't.

Thanks to Collider, we have a few details on the 25 minutes of footage that was screened in LA. It included the big fight with the Comedian with a bit more violence than in the pages of Alan Moore's book. Then the credits roll, and tell you the history of the Watchmen in news clippings, music and pictures.

The audience got to see Dr. Manhattan's transformation and so far everything is getting stellar reviews. Collider described the experience as, "I never, ever thought I’d see Dr. Manhattan on a movie screen, and I never thought I’d see a filmmaker capture the feeling of being in the comic, going back and forth in time, experiencing what it would be like to be inside Manhattan’s head. But Zack did it. And it was awesome."

The next scenes was the great rescue of Rorscach from prison, with the help of Dan and Laurie. It sounds like more bad-boy action for Rorscach and more fight scenes. People are calling it graphic, deserving of its R rating in the best way possible, and epic.

Read the rest of the reaction at Collider.

[Movie Web and Collider]

We've previously told you that Snyder is apparently fighting the studio over the length of his movie, but now a fan petition has appeared online attempting to help Snyder in his fight. The petition, entitled simply CAMPAIGN FOR 3 HOUR WATCHMEN MOVIE FROM WARNER BROS, exists to try and put pressure on Warner Bros. to release an almost full-length (Snyder has previously mentioned a full 210-minute cut of the movie) version of next summer's much-hyped masterpiece:

We, the ‘Minutemen’ below, respectfully demand a 3 hour running time for the forthcoming movie ‘Watchmen’ from Warner Bros. Directed by Zack Snyder (300, Dawn of the Dead), Watchmen is a film adaptation of what is widely regarded by comic fans as the greatest superhero story ever... As with any movie Warner Bros have a responsibility to make ‘Watchmen’ a commercial success and to appeal to a broad audience, many of whom will not be familiar with the story – and therein lies the issue. While discussions with WB studio executives are ongoing about the running time of the movie, there is pressure to ensure that it comes in at below 2hrs and 50 minutes.

We, the ‘Minutemen’ below, submit that Watchmen must be a 3 hour movie and ask WB to respect and extend the courtesy of this longer running time to the giant of all superhero stories.

That's right, people. The people behind the petition have already come up with their own fangroup identification, just like Trekkies, Browncoats and People-Who-Want-To-Have-Sex-With-Ewoks (Admittedly, that last one isn't very catchy). But that's not all they've come up with; they've also worked on reasons why this film shouldn't be edited down to a reasonable length:

1. The Watchmen experience isn’t just about big events and characters in the story, it’s also about small things, the ‘minutiae’. Minor characters and their dramas are part of the meticulously constructed whole - removing any one piece of Watchmen means losing part of its essence

2. Some tough choices have already been made and elements of the story have had to be left out. Previous draft screenplays from David Hayter and Alex Tse have shown the difficulties in making such decisions. Cutting down the movie further will only dilute Watchmen and its potential value as a unique experience for cinema audiences in 2009

3. Watchmen is a landmark work in the graphic medium which is venerated by comic fans and respected by the literary establishment. No other comic book series has ever been accorded such status, for this reason it should be treated with the level of respect any great epic literary work is afforded, not like the average superhero movie. A longer running time of 3 hours, which allows the story to breathe, will tease out what makes Watchmen truly great and different to any other superhero movie released so far.

4. There is only one opportunity for Warner Bros and Zack to get this right. There will be no sequel to Watchmen - it is a stand alone work. Cutting down the running time because of conventional views about audiences having short attention spans could be disastrous. No one wants a Watchmen movie that is rushed, incoherent and ultimately forgettable. Recent years have shown there is great appetite among the cinema-going public for dark, epic heroic stories which are LONG (Lord of the Rings, the Dark Knight, King Kong, etc.) and of great quality.

5. Zack Snyder and WB are waiting to hear how much we want a 3 hour movie. In an interview with MTV on 12 August 2008 Snyder stated that he is interested to see how much online support there is for a 3 hour running time (source: http://www.mtv.com/movies/news... “Right now it runs at around two hours and 50 minutes”, He stated, ”I just don't want to lose any story line, because you know eventually that's what happens. You start to have to cut characters out, and I just don't want to do that”.

It's an interesting series of arguments, especially because... well, they don't really stand up to that much attention. For example, don't the first and second points contradict each other? "You can't cut something out of Watchmen without destroying the whole thing, and they've already cut a lot out've Watchmen." Doesn't that mean that they've already undercut the integrity of the story, and the entire argument is pointless?
Leaving aside the third and fifth points as pretty much useless (The third being "It's an important book, so don't cut anything out," which seems to miss the point that almost all - if not all - adaptations of famous works of literature have had swathes of material cut from them when adapted into movies, and the fifth point being less an argument for not cutting the movie as a random statement), that seems to leave the fourth point as the crux of their argument... which is somewhat unfortunate, in that it's blatantly untrue. "There is only one opportunity for Warner Bros and Zack to get this right"? Which opportunity are they referring to? The theater release of the movie? The DVD release, that was already planned to be longer? The inevitable "Director's Cut" DVD that would follow that one, if the original DVD was successful enough? These days, it's not as if there's only "one" version of any movie anymore, so the idea that there's only one opportunity for any movie to "get it right" is ridiculous. And what does getting it right actually mean, anyway? Making the best movie you can? Being slavishly devoted to the source material, even if it means the movie is overlong? If you're going to demand that something be done "right," it's worth trying to come to some kind of agreed definition of "right" beforehand.

I'm tempted to start another petition about the Watchmen movie. I could call it something like CAMPAIGN FOR A GOOD WATCHMEN MOVIE FROM WARNER BROS, and the body of the text would go something like this:

We, the people who sign this petition below, would like to ask that Watchmen is whatever length it needs to be to make sense and be successful as a movie as opposed to a piece of fan service. Ideally, we'd like that to be less than three hours because, come on, three hours for a movie? That wasn't any fun for any of the Lord Of The Rings movies, and at least they didn't feature radioactive glowing blue men showing off their man junk. Most people don't really like long movies; look at Robert Downey Jr.'s reaction to The Dark Knight. Do you really want to make a movie that'll confuse Robert Downey Jr. even more than The Dark Knight?

[CAMPAIGN FOR 3 HOUR WATCHMEN MOVIE FROM WARNER BROS]

Rick Gamez, whose uncredited prop work has appeared in Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and the most recent Indiana Jones, posted the concept art and finished products for two Nite Owl props.

The owl-shaped handheld is presumably a re-imagined version of the remote that commands Daniel Dreiberg's Owlship. But far more puzzling are the retractable shurikens emblazoned with Nite Owl’s signature crescent moon. Has Nite Owl somehow become a ninja in his leap from page to screen? Or is this Snyder’s attempt to make him seem more like Batman?

Rick’s Custom Props

I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be an adaptation of the book at all - Let's face it, writer Alan Moore has made that case quite well all on his own, thanks very much - but that the sheer bizarre weight of excitement and expectation about the movie is overwhelming and offputting. The sheer fangasm that followed the release of the first trailer, with website after website putting up panel-to-frame comparisons to show just how faithful the movie is to the comic was insane; I don't care how faithful the movie looks to the comic, it'll still be unable to be replicate the level of depth of writing and experience of the comic, even with the already-announced spin-off DVD of Tales Of The Black Freighter filling in the gaps that they're creating by only focusing on the shiny shiny superhero stories.

Obviously, the hardcore fanbase wants the movie to be a success in every way, for probably the wrong reasons. I can't shake the feeling that there's this uncomfortable undercurrent to the excitement that goes something like "Watchmen the comic made everyone else realize that superheroes aren't kids stuff, so now the movie can make everyone realize that superhero movies aren't kids stuff either," missing out that... well, we already have The Dark Knight, thanks very much. There's a level of worship that surrounds Watchmen (the comic), some kind of lack of critical perspective brought on by its historical importance, that tends to make people realize that, for all of its successes (On a technical level, it's almost perfect, and still unmatched in its ambition to use the medium, for example), it's not actually as perfect as many people think it is. If Snyder really stays as faithful to the source material as he claims, how will modern audiences react to the suspect gender-politics, heavy-handed party-politics or ridiculous ending that seemed so daring two decades ago, but now seem clunky and awkward next to Chris Nolan's more complex (if ultimately as unsatisfying) Batmovie?

Not that any of that seems to worry Warner Bros., who seem less concerned with the content of the movie as much as the fact of its very existence. Comic-Con was owned by the hype for the movie this year, from the banner above the entrance to the line of fans waiting since 2am to get into Friday's panel just in case there was any extra footage like they'd heard rumors of. The trailer shows just how Warners are trying to make this seem like a massive movie "event" instead of just another comic book movie: "From the visionary director of 300, the most celebrated graphic novel of all time," it says in between explosions and punches and people yelling in outfits that give no-one unfamiliar with the book any reason to understand why they should be bothered. Yes, it's only the first trailer, but it seems to sum up the entire, insular, advertising campaign so far: "It's just like the comic! Look at the way the posters recreate the advertisements for the comic! You've not read the comic? Well, it's awesome, just trust us! Don't ask any more questions!"

Don't get me wrong; I would love for the Watchmen movie to be great, and to be proven completely wrong with all this cynicism. But so far, instead of seeing anything to get us genuinely excited, we've been shown slavish devotion instead of creativity and been told that we should want to see the movie because it's very important, and that's really not enough. Who watches the Watchmen? All of us, right now; but here's hoping that there's something worth watching when it finally arrives. Watchmen images from Empire Magazine via SpoilerTV-Movies.

Here's what I gleaned from EW's Watchmen coverage: it's a version of the Justice League, where "Superman doesn't care about humanity, Batman can't get it up, and the bad guy wants world peace." Also, it's R-rated and not your average superhero film. Dr. Manhattan is blue and buck naked. It's set in a messed-up world where superheroes are outlawed, and one of them gets murdered. Is it a serial killer or a conspiracy? The psychopathic Rorschach is determined to find out.

Snyder sort of gently mocks most superhero movies, saying films like The Hulk are hard to take seriously, and he wants Watchmen to prove superhero movies aren't "stupid popcorn bullshit." He's fighting with the studio to keep lots of stuff in, saying he might as well make romantic comedies otherwise. (He wants three hours, the studio wants two hours, 25 minutes.) "Will Watchmen be the end of superhero movies? Probably not," he says. "But it sure will kick them in the gut."

Also, the credits sequence that recaps the history of the superheroes in the Watchmen universe is set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'." And, somewhat alarmingly, Snyder has added some new "provocative bits" — including a subplot about alternative fuels.

[Entertainment Weekly]

According to Wilson, who plays the Blue Beetle/Batman analog Nite Owl, Snyder wouldn't even consider changing the climax of the book for the big screen to something happier:

Zack tried to put everything he could in and he left it to the studio to cut it and tell him what he can’t fit in. For the script we started with, every scene has something different than what’s on the page... I have to say, if you know how much Zack believes in it, you wouldn’t believe he would go that far from the graphic novel. I don’t know how those rumors start, but that’d be a stretch!

Meanwhile, ahead of tonight's debut of the movie's trailer in theaters, Empire Online has the world exclusive online premiere for you to view. I'm not entirely convinced - it looks too clean to me, especially the Comedian in a very shiny Vietnam - but make up your own mind while enjoying the Billy Corgan sneering soundtrack.

Watchmen Trailer [Empire Online]
Patrick Wilson Says ‘Watchmen’ Ending Remains The Same

The Dark Knight:

The Dark Knight's "third act" involves multiple tense hostage situations, and it's not just a huge concluding fight scene. [Comic Book Resources]

More Joker-isms from the film: "You can't let me go." "In their last moments, people show you who they really are." The Joker does a deadly and stomach-churning "pencil trick" when he introduces himself to a room full of Gotham mobsters. He induces city-wide evacuations and "social experiments" that involve driving citizens to kill each other. [New York Post]

Watchmen:

It's almost as if director Zack Snyder read our rant about how superhero odyssey Watchmen should be about the history of superhero movies the way the original graphic novel was about comics history. (Although I'm sure he didn't.) In an interview with Collider, he mentions that Ozymandias' costume has nipples on it like the Joel Schumacher Batsuit, and this is part of an effort to acknowledge "where comic book movies are right now," the same way the graphic novel did for comics. Color me intrigued, actually. [Collider via Comic Book Resources]

Star Wars:

In the eagerly awaited Star Wars video game The Force Unleashed, Darth Vader travels to the planet Kashyyyk to track down one of the last surviving Jedi (after Revenge Of The Sith.) That's when you have your first major "boss battle" in the game. And then Vader is about to strike the killing blow, and a small child disarms him using the Force. Vader sees potential in the kid, who becomes his Secret Apprentice, going on missions and hiding from the Imperials as well as the Rebels. In the course of the game, you'll see important events like the birth of the Rebellion. [Comic Book Resources again]

Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog:

Some more details about Joss Whedon's online serialized musical Dr. Horrible have emerged. Dr. Horrible's real name is Billy, and when we first see him he's practicing his evil laugh in hopes of being taken seriously by the Evil League Of Evil. And he reads snarky emails from his skeptical online following.

He sings, "The world's a mess and I just want to rule it." He works on a freeze ray that will stop time and "stop the pain," as he sings at one point. But really, Billy's heart belongs to Penny, a goody two-shoes whom he meets at the laundromat. But whenever he's around Penny, he's bashful and stammering — and of course she falls for his arch-nemesis Captain Hammer, who's a boorish cad who says things like, "I don't go to the gym. I just naturally look like this."

Buffy The Vampire Slayer producers Marti Noxon and David Fury, who had cameos in the Buffy musical episode, show up as snarky newscasters. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

Heroes:

Remember how we said Heroes' Ali Larter would be back, but not as Niki Sanders? Turns out her new personality is named Tracy Strauss. Meanwhile, psychic cop Matt will end up in the desert with a nameless horse and a tortoise. Matt's story is about to get super trippy. [E! Online]

Chuck:

The fifth episode of the new Chuck season starts with a flashback to 1983, and a much younger Jeff winning the Moto Industries Missile Command video game championship, sporting a mullet and mustache, with bikini-wearing babes on each arm. In the present day, a virus is sweeping through Moto Industries' computers. Chuck and Casey go undercover as Nerd Herders to find out what's going on, but in the end it's Sarah's blonde wiles that get the inside scoop. Turns out terrorists have hacked a dormant satellite and want to launch nuclear missiles, causing World War III. The key to stopping the satellite can only be found on the final level of Missile Command. Chuck must beat the game and save the world, but to do that he needs the music of a certain Canadian band. [Chuck TV]

The Middleman:

Spoilers for the awesome new superhero show The Middleman: The Middleman and Wendy's roommate Lacey go on a date in episode seven, and he sneaks milk into the restaurant in a flask. In another episode, someone climbs into the Middle Mobile and presses "autopilot." The possible destinations are the creamery, the duck pond and church. Upcoming villains include a haunted tuba, a boy band that's actually five banished intergalactic dictators, a vampire ventriloquist dummy and a haunted sorority where the Middleman gets possessed by one of the girls. [NY Post]

Stargate: Atlantis:

The 15th episode of the new season of Stargate: Atlantis is called "Remnants," and some alleged details have leaked out: Sheppard finds himself tied up in the middle of the forest, while Woolsey struggles to flirt with a newly arrived attractive female colleague named Vanessa Conrad. Sheppard gets free, but his gun and radio are gone, and he's got unpleasant company, in the form of Mr. Koyla, nearby, who's eager to torment him. Meanwhile, Woolsey can't find any trace of Vanessa, the woman he was crushed out on, and he begins to doubt his own sanity.

It turns out Vanessa Conrad is just a manifestation of Woolsey's romantic and sexual ideals, from an alien "seed carrier" that a civilization that was on the verge of extinction sent out across the galaxy thousands of years ago, to start over. The "seed carrier" lay dormant at the bottom of the ocean for centuries, until Sheppard's jumper woke it up. The vision of Koyla was meant to distract Sheppard, since as a military man he might use force against the seed-carrier's vessel — but any torment Sheppard experienced was of his own making. (Sort of, it's confusing.) Meanwhile, the seed-carrier connected with Woolsey, to study him and maybe enlist his aid. In the end, our heroes have to make a tough decision of some kind. [Notes... Written On Water]

This really hit me while I was watching an interview with Watchmen director Zack Snyder the other day, and he was talking about trying to do justice to the graphic novel. Judging from his Spartan war movie 300 and the early Watchmen images, Snyder's a graphic-novel fetishist who will do everything in his power to do a perfect "cover version" of Moore and Gibbons' comic. And I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?

Here are some reasons I don't think Watchmen will be that great of a movie:

It's about the history of comics. Originally, Moore was writing a comics series about the old Charlton comics heroes, like The Question, the Atom, Blue Beetle, and so on. At the time, DC had just acquired these properties, and Moore was going to have free reign to fuck them up. But then someone at DC decided to play it safe, and Moore had to come up with all new characters: Nite Owl instead of Blue Beetle, Rohrschach instead of the Question, Dr. Manhattan instead of Captain Atom. In the process of developing all these new characters, Moore came up with a whole detailed history of their Minutemen superteam, including a ton of backup documentation, including Hollis Mason's book Under The Hood. The result is like a history of superhero comics, going back to the Golden Age and showing how the superhero in comics had matured and darkened. It influenced the generation of superhero comics that followed.

Why couldn't we have had a Watchmen movie that commented on the history of superhero movies in the same way that the graphic novel commented on comics history? With sly references to the 1966 Batman movie and Tim Burton's 1989 version, and the weird history of Supergirl/Elektra girl spinoff movies? And the Corman Fantastic Four versus the superslick recent ones? Wouldn't that have been more interesting than a slavish Alan Moore tribute?

It's about experimenting with the comics format. Moore, of course, doesn't want there to be a Watchmen movie because of his struggles with Hollywood in general. But he also makes an important point, in an interview:

The problem with taking Watchmen to another medium is that we deliberately set out to establish—hard—some territory for comics. We tried to exploit the things in comics that cannot be done in any other medium... In a perfect world I’d rather see it as a comic. This insistence that if something is a success in one medium then it can automatically be translated to another and still be a success…

The most famous format experiment in Watchmen, of course, is the Black Freighter comic that we see a kid reading. It's a weirdly meta moment: not just a comic within a comic, but also a comic portraying the experience of reading a comic book and being caught up in it. The Black Freighter won't be in the theatrical release of Watchmen at all, of course — it'll be a separate animated DVD, and included in a DVD version at some point. But either way, it won't represent the same kind of experiment with the comics format that the graphic novel was.



Also, Moore explained in another interview:

What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating. Like in Watchmen, all that subliminal shit we were getting into the backgrounds. You are trapped in the running time of a film – you go in, you sit down, they’ve got two hours and you’re dragged through at their pace. With a comic you can stare at the page for as long as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that one, and wonder if there is some connection there... Watchmen was designed to be read four or five times.

According to Moore, Terry Gilliam was looking at directing Watchmen, but he got stymied thinking about all the texture and narrative complexity he was going to have to cut out to make it work. Gilliam ended up coming around to Moore's point of view.

Watchmen is of its time. Just look at this set photo from Snyder's movie. It's trying very, very hard to look like New York, circa 1985 — and it's mostly succeeding, way more than the American version of Life On Mars manages to capture 1972 Los Angeles. But it's also missing the point: Watchmen is supposed to take place in the present day, an alternate present where Richard Nixon is still president, superheroes are real, and the Cold War is even more fucked up than it really was. The storyline loses a lot of its impact if you put it 24 years into the past, no matter how lovingly you construct that past. And it's going to take a lot more than gorgeous sets and obsessive attention to detail to conjure the long-gone Cold War mindset for moviegoers, many of whom were in diapers when the Berlin Wall fell.

Without being too spoilery for an old comic book, the story's climax depends heavily on understanding Reagan-era concepts like Mutually Assured Destruction and the winnable nuclear war. Even people who were grown-ups back then can barely wrap their minds around those things now.

The movie will pander to fans. That's the thing that will probably doom Watchmen, actually — it's aimed at the ultra-obsessive fans of the graphic novel. Not just the people who read it and enjoyed it once or twice — the people whose original copies are dog-eared and sweat-stained, and who then went out and bought the Absolute edition for $100. Not just because of the obsessive copying of every facet of Moore and Gibbons' accomplishment — even down to using newsreels to copy the text portions of the story — but also because of the story's insularity, and the way it comments on superhero narratives. Snyder's 300 worked because it was a fairly simple story that really was from history, as opposed to Watchmen's byzantine wheels-within-wheels story.

In short: the Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Additional research by Lauren Davis.

A couple of months ago, Watchmen director Zack Snyder invited fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel to create fake advertisements for products created by Adrian Veidt's corporation that would then be played in the background of various scenes of the actual movie. The fans, of course, delivered, and the fruits of their labors are now available for us all to see on the Watchmen YouTube channel.

Five videos were selected by YouTube viewers as worthy of receiving High-Definition Canon Vixia HG10 camcorders, while a further ten were hand-picked by Snyder himself as being worthy of appearing behind Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Billy Crudup as they wrestle with Alan Moore's dialogue. Here are some of the best:



Veidt Enterprises Advertising Contest [YouTube]

Black Freighter is an interweaving comic-within-a-comic story. It's actually the comic book read by the kid sitting outside the newsstand in the Watchmen books. The kid becomes the narrator while reading his comic. The actual Black Freighter tells the story of a castaway who is desperately trying to get home to warn family and friends about the arrival of the Black Freighter, a ship of ghosts.

"I thought the 'Black Freighter' story would never see the light of day," Snyder told the New York Times. "The main picture is nearing three hours long and I know I have a fight on my hands just with that."

The new movie was originally going to be shot in Snyder's familiar 300 style, but when the budget went past 20 million the studio changed it to straight animation. Still, this stunt by Warner won't be cheap. Retaining Snyder and some of the members from the Watchmen cast (if they reappear) has got to be pricey. And Warner's revealed they would be spending 30 to 50 percent more on the DVDs than in a typical direct-DVD project.

And if your Watchmen saturation level still hasn't been reached, the studio plans to release an additional 12 webisodes each about 22 to 26 minutes in length titled, The Watchmen Motion Comic. The web shorts will be a slide show of comic panels with a narrator. Snyder is also overseeing this project, which he should have an eye for after his meticulous comic-panel set design that's been showcased in recent set photos.

Although I'm incredibly excited to see Snyder piece together the entire Watchmen story (and be given the creative space to do so) I'm not so sure about the whole DVD affair. Blu-ray is neat but with the creation of the new Netflix set-top box, DVDs appear to be going to the way of the Dodo. [New York Times]

Last year, dystopian future movie Babylon A.D. held a contest on MySpace to generate user video to appear on video screens in the background of some of the film's scenes:

[Director] Mathieu [Kassovitz]'s goal is to enhance the authenticity of this film by adding futuristic and innovative ads and fake news footage. We will integrate them, throughout the film on various screens : futuristic TVs, personal tablets, vehicles and especially on a huge scale, on the sides of New York buildings. That is why he thought he should launch this contest to give a chance to anyone who wishes to show their vision of the future.

A surprisingly long list of people "won" the contest, which means Vin Diesel will be scowling his way past loads of weird video made by tweens using FinalCutPro. Which is sort of awesome, actually. Also, I think Diary Of The Dead had a similar contest recently. [Watchmen YouTube contest, thanks to Michael]

Talking about how the movie's Times Square set is "kind of realistic but with our own Watchmen overtones," production designer Alex McDowell spends four minutes comparing movie sets to panels from Dave Gibbons' artwork from the series, and earnestly telling you how seriously he's taking his job:

It's really important for us to establish a world that is real to an audience, but absolutely remains faithful to the vision of the graphic novel.

The First Watchmen Video Journal! [ComingSoon.net]

I only have one nitpick about these gorgeous images, and that's that Nite Owl looks way more like Batman than Blue Beetle, the old-school superhero which Moore and Gibbons actually based him on. But having a Batman-esque figure in the film is probably a good thing for its marketability... even if he turns out to be as much of a schlub as his counterpart in the graphic novel. [Watchmen blog, thanks Abraham and Jamais!]

According to Butler, "It's this descent into madness but explained in such a sane way that you totally feel it yourself." Which doesn't make much sense now, but we'll go along with it. If all future comic book related DVDs received this much attention to detail, it might create a new market and medium for comic books. Just imagine X-Men: Days of Future Past, The DVD. Unfortunatelty, it also means you'll have to double dip at the theater and later on DVD if you want the full experience. [Empire Online]

Explaining the importance of storyboards to his process, Snyder wrote:

Storyboards play a vital part in my process long before I start sharing them with my team. I've always storyboarded my commercials and movies. It is a key part of my process for envisioning the entire film from beginning to end. In addition to using that drawing time to figure out blocking and action, it is also when I can begin to get a sense of whether the dialog and pacing are working. As you can see from these frames, my storyboards aren't necessarily super-finished art pieces on their own. I often find that the frames that get the most detail are the ones where I'm stalling - thinking of the next shots. In contrast, if I already have a sequence sorted out in my head, the boards tend to be much sketchier.

Storyboards [Watchmen blog]

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.
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• The opening credits are described as dozens of watches floating around the screen. Lame.
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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."

• 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?
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• 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.

• 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.
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• 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.
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• Veidt impersonates Dr. Manhattan, and fires beams of concentrated... er, "big blue energy clouds" into key cities around the globe, killing three million people.
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• 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.

• 
  

At any rate, we'll be watching these Watchmen.