Masterpiece Cinema - Watchmen

Hello everybody, This week were going to be doing something a little bit different - we're going to be taking a look at a comic book. How does this relate to the topic of Masterpiece Cinema? Put your trust in me, dear reader, and I'll form a connection between the two that will astound and satisfy you!

Watchmen written by Alan Moore.

If you've been a fan of comics anytime in the past twenty years, chances are youve heard of Watchmen. It was a twelve-issue mini-series that DC published back in the 1980s. Written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, its generally recognized as one of the greatest works in the genre, if not the greatest of all. This might not mean much to you. You may consider comics to be something that are just for kids. But Watchmen is anything but this. Its a dark, complex dissection of the superhero genre that Steve Edgell of Escape called the first great human act in superhero comics, and Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone called peerless

The plot is such an intricate thing to go into that to do it justice would almost be impossible (and also expose my complete inability to succinctly summarize stories a real problem for someone that writes reviews). All you really need to know is that the story is set in the 1980s, but that this reality is different to our own thanks to the emergence of masked men in the 40s. Technology is a little more advanced, Nixon is still the President, and the world is standing on the very brink of nuclear war with the USSR well, even more on the brink than it was at the time in our world.

In amongst all this, a heavy-set, 60-year-old man by the name of Edward Blake is thrown through the window of his apartment after being brutally beaten. The police don't have an explanation for it. But the masked vigilante Rorschach has a theory. Blake was the Comedian, a brutal hero sanctioned by the government to carry out assassinations. Rorschach believes the Comedian was just the first victim in a murder spree targeting vigilantes, so now he has to warn his fellow masked heroes while trying to figure out whos behind it all.
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That's the most basic premise of the story it in fact stretches far, far beyond that. Its a monolith of a piece, with each issue in the twelve-part limited series further astounding the reader with its level of thought and detail. It's an ingenious piece of work, something that has made an eternal impression on the field of comics, but that has never been replicated in terms of creative success.

So whats this all got to do with cinema? Well, before it had even finished it's original run back in the mid-80s, Hollywoods been trying to get a big screen version of Watchmen up and running. Joel Silver, the producer behind such Hollywood blockbusters as Die Hard, Predator and The Matrix trilogy, had his eye on the piece for a long time, as did director Terry Gilliam.

The problem with adapting Watchmen, however, is like adapting any of Moores other works; theyre just too dense to bring to the silver screen at an acceptable running time without stripping the story of all its nuance and allowing it to be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill action-adventure film. We saw this problem with The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, another mini-series written by Moore. All the character and historical detail of the story was ripped out and replaced by the generic conventions of a clunky Hollywood movie. It was a damn shame.

The rumour mill is starting up again on a Watchmen film being made, with Sigourney Weaver and Daniel Craig being talked about for roles. Theres also discussion of the plot being significantly altered, what with the climax of the book too closely resembling the events of September 11. Of course, changing the climax of the story would ruin the whole thingso then what would be the point of doing it at all?

If you want to get a better idea of why Watchmen is the comic book benchmark that it is (with my clumsy words obviously having failed you) go out and pick up the trade paperback from your nearest comic book shop. It collects all twelve issues, so you can read it all in one sitting, and you can see why bringing this to the silver screen would be such a grand challenge and one challenge that would probably be best left unattempted.

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