We never saw Terry Gilliam‘s adaptation of Alan Moore‘s “Watchmen“, which producer Joel Silver had set up at Fox before eventually turning the film into a disappointing experiment at Warner Bros. with Zack Snyder at the helm. Disappointment or not, it apparently isn’t allowed to be forgotten as Silver recently revisited the film and its production with ComingSoon telling the site Snyder’s version was a “slave” to the graphic novel and Gilliam’s would have been “a MUCH much better movie.”
Well, Snyder is going to take this lying down. In a new interview with The Huffington Post, Snyder and his wife and 300: Rise of an Empire co-producer Deborah Snyder revisited Watchmen and addressed Silver’s comments.
Zack Snyder begins:
[I]f you read the Gilliam ending, it’s completely insane. […] Yeah, the fans would have stormed the castle on that one. So, honestly, I made Watchmen for myself. It’s probably my favorite movie that I’ve made. And I love the graphic novel and I really love everything about the movie. I love the style. I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.
I’m sure the idea of saving movies from the “Terry Gilliams of this world” is sure to get Snyder a bit of a tongue lashing from many of the fanboys he then tackles next:
That’s the problem with comic book movies and genre. And I believe that we’ve evolved — I believe that the audiences have evolved. I feel like “Watchmen” came out at sort of the height of the snarky Internet fanboy — like, when he had his biggest strength. And I think if that movie came out now — and this is just my opinion — because now that we’ve had “Avengers” and comic book culture is well established, I think people would realize that the movie is a satire.
You know, the whole movie is a satire. It’s a genre-busting movie. The graphic novel was written to analyze the graphic novel — and comic books and the Cold War and politics and the place that comic books play in the mythology of pop culture. I guess that’s what I’m getting at with the end of “Watchmen” — in the end, the most important thing with the end was that it tells the story of the graphic novel.
The morality tale of the graphic novel is still told exactly as it was told in the graphic novel — I used slightly different devices. The Gilliam version, if you look at it, it has nothing to do with the idea that is the end of the graphic novel. And that’s the thing that I would go, “Well, then don’t do it.” It doesn’t make any sense.
So Snyder seems to back up the “slave” to the graphic novel idea here and then proves he is entirely confused over the evolution of the Internet fanboy. Evolved? Into what? I’d say we’re still in the chimp phase if you ask me.
As for that Gilliam ending, Silver told ComingSoon:
So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they’re all of the sudden in Times Square and there’s a kid reading a comic book. They become like the people in Times Square dressing up like characters as opposed to really BEING those characters. There’s a kid reading the comic book and he’s like, “Hey, you’re just like in my comic book.” It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn’t happen. Lost to time.
Nevertheless, we’re debating the quality of a film that set a disturbing, slow motion sex scene to the tune “Hallelujah”. You won’t be discredited if you admit to forgetting it even existed.
