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Is Before Watchmen Taking On Sam Hamm's Movie Script?

Published Wed, 10 Oct 2012 10:00:54 -0500

Something always struck me about Sam Hamm's screenplay for a Watchmen film that was never made, was it actually had a decent ending. Oh, no squid, and no mega bombs, but the tachyon-emmitting device was, appropriately enough, a time machine. Ozymandias' plan was to go back in time and prevent the existence of Dr Manhattan. And he succeeds – he did it thirty-five minutes ago. The cast of Watchmen emerge in a world that never had Dr Manhattan – our world. And wonder what they do now.

Before Watchmen: Dr Manhattan #1 diverged rather widely from the way Alan Moore established reality, a fixed state universe full of miracles, into the possibilities of parallel realities, and Dr Manhattan choosing between them and, for some reason, negating his existence.

Here, it doesn't seem to have the same effect and we do see other Watchmen characters existing and interfering with the natural ways of things. We even get a Comedian shooting JFK, something which was done away with in Before Watchmen: Comedian. But that's only one alternative. We have a splintered universe, backed up by some odd reading of Schrodinger's Cat – albeit it, not as bad as last month. But what JMS and Adam Hughes get to show us here are Sliding Doors, with both small and large changes, a real mess.

It's the bravest departure from the original text, and there is the feeling that it may get a big red reset button at the end, but it does make for some fun storytelling tricks. And that, for me at least, was always the legacy of Watchmen. Finding new ways to tell comic book stories..