Terry Gilliams Watchmen
WHAT WE KNOW:[]
Joel Silver has been talking about the Watchmen movie he endeavoured to make with Terry Gilliam, giving a detailed account of the ending they planned.
Sam Hamm wrote the script, which differs dramatically to Alan Moore’s original, as Silver explained to ComingSoon…
“What he did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure.
“He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from Watchmen only became characters in a comic book.
“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.”
Silver adds that he likes what Zack Snyder eventually did with the property, but also says that his, Hamm and Gilliam’s version would have been “a much, much better movie.” So do you agree?