Cinematical

Alan Moore has stated that he wrote Watchmen to be the last word in superhero comics. Now that the modern comic book film has come into its own (The Weinstein Company even has a parody of the genre in the works called Superhero!), a successful Watchmen adaptation might be just the thing to shake things up, to blow the genre's conventions out of the water before they become cliched. The world is ready for a decent film based on an Alan Moore work. If there is any cosmic balance in the universe, the dreadfulness that was Stephen Norrington's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could in theory be balanced by (fingers crossed) Zack Snyder's Watchmen. Snyder surprised me with the Dawn of the Dead remake and I'm hearing good things about 300, so I can dare to dream, can't I?

Snyder has been attached to the project for some time, and he recently spoke with Empire online about where the proposed film stands. "We're getting ready to turn a script that we like into this studio," says Snyder. "They're pretty excited about it...I think the script that Alex (Tse) has done for us is the closest to the graphic novel it's been [since development started], for better or for worse. I feel like Alex has done an awesome job. It's keeping all the things that are cool about the comic."
What I find especially interesting is Snyder's decision to set the film in the 1980s. Of course, this will be an alternate version of the 1980s in which Richard Nixon is still president, a blue-skinned godlike being won the Vietnam War single-handedly, and superheroes have been outlawed. "1985's a problem for people," Snyder continues. "The Cold War's a problem for people. But these are things I've been trying to [tell people] would be cool. Those kinds of things tell you exactly what kind of movie this is – it's not Fantastic Four, you know".

Snyder also discounted the notion that Watchmen might utilize the all-green screen approach used by Sin City and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. "There are places like Mars and Antarctica [which will need to be blue screen] and then there are certain places where you need to feel the reality...If you look at Sin City, a blue screen city, that's kind of wrong for Watchmen."