There’s officially a new chapter in the seemingly endless saga of the making of the Watchmen movie – as has been rumored for some time now, Zack Snyder, director of the Dawn of the Dead remake and the upcoming nudity epic 300, has signed on to direct the film. The big news is that Alex Tse has been hired to write the script.
Who is Alex Tse? Good question. The guy’s more or less a newbie – his only produced work was the pilot for the Showtime show Sucker Free City, for Spike Lee. I found a San Francisco Chronicle profile that describes him like this: “With baggy clothes, sullen face still unmarked by age and the occasional "hella" in his vocabulary, he looks and acts far younger than his 27 years.” Tse, you best keep that shitty word ‘hella’ out of Rorschach’s mouth.
I’m torn on this one. First of all, the David Hayter script that Paul Greengrass had was just about perfect. I honestly couldn’t imagine a better way of packing those 12 comics into one movie than that script. On the other hand, Tse is supposed to be quite talented, even if he doesn’t have the produced work to prove it. And on the third hand, does anyone think this movie will ever actually get made? As much as I like the folks behind this project, Watchmen often feels like the greatest movie that will never be filmed, like a superhero version of Orson Welles’ Don Quixote.