Watchmen
Director’s Cut Blu-ray
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matthew Goode
Warner Home Video
Release Date: July 21, 2009

This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’…and I’ll whisper, ‘no.’

What would you do in order to ensure the safety of all mankind? Would you sacrifice millions of lives if it meant saving billions of other lives and creating a perfect and peaceful world? This is the impossibly difficult scenario placed in front of a small group of crime fighters known simply as Watchmen.

Watchmen is based on the timeless graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The book is the only graphic novel on Time magazine’s top 100 novels of all time — a truly epic feat for its platform. For many years, the novel was also called “unfilmable” by most people who strongly believed that no one could faithfully and accurately adapt the complex story and characters into a movie. Director Zack Snyder was the man to finally try and accomplish this impossible feat, and even better, he did it because he didn’t want to see anyone else try and fail miserably. Any time a director takes on a project simply to protect the legacy of of the film’s source material, you know you’re in for some top-notch passionate filmmaking.

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Rated R
Release date: March 6, 2009

This movie should not exist. There have been rumors of its making finally happening for many years. How many acclaimed visionary filmmakers have tried and failed to make this movie? Terry Gilliam, Paul Greengrass, and Darren Aronofsky are the most well known. I’ve been reading the reports of development and false starts in the pages of magazines like Wizard and entertainment web sites since I was a kid. The material first came to me more than a decade ago after I had read about it for many years and after digesting the collected volume in a single setting I stared off into space wondering how in the hell they could ever make a movie of this. It was impossible, a mad folly that would frighten even Werner Herzog. There was just too much in this book to absorb. I myself even attempted to create a movie version in my head just for fun and see how it would play. It practically fried my brain, but then again I wasn’t a director or a screenwriter.

What brave soul would take on Watchmen, the landmark comic miniseries created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that ran for twelve remarkable issues from 1986-1987 and has been credited with ushering in a darker and more introspective age of comic book storytelling, and not just live to win to tell the tale but conquer the bloody thing? Why did George Leigh Mallory attempt to climb Mount Everest 75 years ago and die in the process? “Because,” as he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1923, “it’s there.” But his son John also had something to add: “To me the only way you achieve a summit is to come back alive. The job is half done if you don’t get down again.” Zack Snyder, the former music video and commercial director who made a blazing feature directorial debut with the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and followed it with the blockbuster 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, took on the mountain that defeated many a great filmmaker before him and reached the goddamned summit.

A few new Watchmen items have surfaced. The first is a new post at The New Frontiersman, which contains an old-school MTV-style video segment from 1983 with a rundown of the members of the Watchmen superhero team called “Who Watches The Watchmen?” (You can watch the video here below.) The video countdown is in honor of the release of the perfume Nostalgia, created by Watchmen smart guy Adrian Veidt (aka Ozymandias), now a billionaire with tons of products to endorse. Veidt has his hand in everything, including the video network running the segment — VMN (Veidt Music Network).

A cool part of the video is the opening, which is a take on the 80’s MTV moon landing opening, but in VMN’s, you can see the reflection of Dr. Manhattan in the spacesuit helmet.

Also released this week is an old print ad from 1985 for Veidt’s aforementioned Nostalgia – click the image here at right to see a larger view.