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SALLY JUPITER Carla Gugino's character gets an earful from Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Comedian
Clay Enos

The result was a piercing deconstruction of superhero mythology told with a sophistication unprecedented for the genre. ''At the time, comic books had hit the ceiling,'' Snyder says. ''Superman had done everything he could do; the X-Men and Fantastic Four had faced every possible bad guy and end-of-the-world scenario. And then Watchmen came along and took it to the next level by breaking all the rules.'' Snyder — who was into naughty sci-fi/fantasy comics like Heavy Metal magazine as a teen and discovered Watchmen during college — believes the global multiplex is now ripe for a similar revolution. ''The average movie audience has seen so many superhero movies,'' he says. ''And some of this stuff is hard to take seriously. I mean, The Hulk? Come on.'' Snyder remembers screening some Watchmen footage for an unnamed studio executive. Afterward, Snyder says, the exec turned to him and said, ''This makes Superman look stupid.''

Superhero movies have taken a serious turn lately, with The Dark Knight and Hancock. Still, the odds of Snyder making a fantastic, faithful adaptation of Watchmen are against him. Until recently, the director belonged to a school of thought that believed this dense, dark jewel — the fanboy's Catcher in the Rye, the rite-of-passage text for any serious geek — couldn't and maybe shouldn't be made into a movie. That school still includes Watchmen creator Moore, who has disavowed the film because of his general disdain for Hollywood, and his long-standing conflicts with DC Comics, a Warner Bros. sister company. ''Watchmen works perfectly fine as a comic,'' says the British scribe, who has scrubbed his name from the film's credits and abdicated his royalty check to Gibbons. ''There are things we did that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off the things that comics can do that other media can't.''

NEXT PAGE: ''There was definitely a conversation about the best way to make it contemporary and relevant to today. Zack felt the best way was to go back to the roots of the novel.''


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