Talking about Zack Snyder reminded me of something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while.

Zack has been working for some time on the long-languishing comic-to-film translation of the Citizen Kane of comic books, The Watchmen. Now I’ve been against these types of translations from the start. My feeling is that it’s a perfectly good comic, people should just go read it. There’s no need to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen it up.

Fortunately for me, out of the many people who tried, Terry Gilliam said it best, calling it “unfilmable,” essentially guaranteeing that I won’‘t see it ruined. And let me tell you, when Terry Gilliam says something is unfilmable, I say you best listen. He knows a thing or two about difficult shoots. Anyway, every time I’d hear something new about Watchmen, I’d get uneasy, but would very quickly be comforted by the fact that yet another name has decided to agree with Terry and backed out.

The thing is, though, since Zack got involved, the backing out part hasn’t happened. This had me very worried for a very long time. Then I saw 300, and remembered back to several years prior when I read Frank Miller’s comic and deemed it unfilmable, and thanked my lucky stars no one would ever try to make it into a movie. Then I remembered back to when I scoffed at someone remaking Dawn of the Dead. “They’re just throwing their money away,” I said. “I won’t go see that.”

Well, in both those cases, Zack greatly surpassed my expectations. He didn’t just make “passable” movies out of those two properties, he made really darn fine films. I’ve now dediced to “let go; let Zack” and trust that he knows what he’s doing, and have actually begun to get a little excited about seeing The Watchmen on the big screen.

Zack is going to do it. There’s a good chance it might be good.

I take comfort in that fact.

Defined tags for this entry: comics, movies, watchmen, zack snyder