ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’S GUIDE TO WATCHMEN

FEATURING SIX COLLECTIBLE WATCHMEN COVERS OF RORSCHACH, THE COMEDIAN, DR. MANHATTAN, SILK SPECTRE, NITE OWL, AND OZYMANDIAS

All superhero movies are violent, but Watchmen revels in blood – not to mention sex and politics.  It took the film 23 years to get to the screen, and this week’s Entertainment Weekly determines who will be able to handle it.  When it hits theaters on March 6, the comic-book cognoscenti will be there, but what about mainstream moviegoers?  Watchmen’s financial backers are clearly hoping the success of The Dark Knight has primed the market for sophisticated superhero films.  But where The Dark Knight transcended genre conventions, Watchmen wallows in them.

Fans came in droves to check out a first look of the allegedly unfilmable superhero movie at July’s annual geek pop summit known as Comic-Con.  Many spent the night on the sidewalk.  Some arrived in costumes.  Even indie-movie icon Kevin Smith, a.k.a. the Most Famous Fanboy in the World, came along.  “You have to understand, I’ve been waiting for this moment for years,” he says.  “This is it, man.  This is the pinnacle.  You have no idea how f---ing pumped I am.” 

All this, for a violent, ironic superhero epic that doesn’t like superheroes in the first place.  Directed by 300’s Zack Snyder, Watchmen presents a set of familiar superhero archetypes – and then subverts them completely, turning them into criminals, jerks, narcissists, megalomaniacs, and plain ol’ whiny wusses.  “Watchmen is a kind of thrilling thought experiment.  What would people who dress up in costumes to fight crime actually be like?  Well, they’d probably be fetishists who lived on the fringes of society.  They’d all be a bunch of freaking lunatics,” says Billy Crudup, whose blue, naked Dr. Manhattan is an almighty Superman dangerously detached from his own humanity.

Yet for all its self-awareness and cynicism, Watchmen isn’t some cheap-and-silly Scary Movie parody.  Adapted faithfully, if not completely, from the celebrated 1986 comic-book series, Snyder’s film is visually and intellectually ambitious, filled with heady ruminations about savior figures, pop culture, and the politics of fear.    Snyder believes his movie can serve as a bracing blast of healthy skepticism.  “Someone asked me if I thought that because Barack Obama had been elected president, the movie was no longer relevant.  I said, ‘Wow, that’s a very optimistic view of the future!’” says Snyder.  “The movie, like the comic, says, ‘These superhero stories you’ve been feasting on?  What if we took them seriously?  What if we thought through the consequences?  Where do they get us?’  That’s the fun.”

Created by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons and first published as a 12-issue serial in 1986, Watchmen is most often praised as the comic book that brought respect and maturity to a medium long dismissed as juvenile.  “I would devour each issue over and over again, knowing that I was missing things because I was too young to grasp them,” says Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, who cites the comic’s use of origin-story flashbacks and hidden clues as a major influence on his show.  “But at the same time, I was so excited by the violence and, yeah, the sex.  I felt like Watchmen was this very, very bad thing that I shouldn’t be reading, and if my mom caught me with it I’d be f---ing doomed.” 

Hollywood was similarly struck by Watchmen, but has been much less successful at avoiding the doom.  In 1986, Twentieth Century Fox acquired the comic’s rights for producer Larry Gordon, but could never get an adaptation rolling.  Over the next decade, the film bounced among many studios and between many directors before finding what appeared to be a happy ending at Paramount.  But in 2005, with helmer Paul Greengrass deep into preproduction, a Paramount regime change killed the project.  And as Lloyd Levin explains, “It was very difficult for every studio exec to appreciate all its aspects.”  Hence, Watchmen’s reputation as the Unfilmable Graphic Novel. 

But tides changed in late 2005 when Warner Bros. acquired the property from Paramount with the hope of rolling on Watchmen ASAP.  “I had been a big fan of the graphic novel and had been looking for ways to make it into a movie,” says Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros. Picture Group president.  “It felt different and left-of-center from anything else out there, and we felt that in the hands of a director with a strong vision, it could be provocative in a way that could appeal to a broad audience.”  He then turned to Snyder, who was wary but interested.  “My first reaction was ‘This can’t be done.  It probably shouldn’t be done,’” says Snyder.  “But then I said, ‘If you really are going to do this, here’s how I think you should do it…’”

Snyder’s approach was simple: he would remain religiously faithful to the comic.  He also believed that an “adult” superhero epic needed to be explicit about its “adult” content.  “I wanted to make sure everyone understood: This is not a kid movie,” says Snyder.  “Violence has consequences.  And doing that with a PG-13 just dilutes that message.” 

But his plans may have been pre-mature.  Last February, Twentieth Century Fox sought to stop Warner Bros. from moving forward with Watchmen’s release, claiming via lawsuit that Warner Bros. had not properly acquired the distribution rights.  The dispute exploded in the media last August when a judge declared that Fox’s lawsuit had merit.  “How do you not know whether or not you have the right to make a movie?” says Crudup.  “Hilarious.”  But after months of intense press coverage, the two studios reached a settlement.  “It was scary, dude,” says Jeffrey Dean Morgan.  “I thought for a while there that the movie would wind up on a shelf somewhere.  But that sure as hell made for some great publicity, though.”

With a $100 million-plus budget and a running time of 161 minutes, Watchmen will need to launch with a big opening weekend and strong reviews.  “The movie is impactful, tough, and true to the book that we all loved, and I’m very proud of it,” says Robinov. 

So will geek love – and geek dollars – be enough?  Snyder hopes so.  He says he made the film for that crowd.  “I don’t think there ever has been a movie more custom-made for them.  Not at this scale,” he says.  “And now they have an opportunity to really influence pop culture in a serious way, just as the comic influenced comics.  They can say: ‘These stories can be used to say something about the world.  Give us more of them.’”  (Cover Story, Page 22)

Link to story on EW.com: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20260130,00.html