I haven’t been keeping track much on movies lately, but apparently, the film adaptation of the Watchmen (March 6, 2009 release date) has just wrapped and the first still from the film has been released. Zack Snyder is directing, so it’s not really surprising that it looks great – very evocative of the original comic. Now the question, I suppose is whether it’ll be a good filmic adaptation (for those that haven’t read Watchmen, it’s probably one of the best graphic novels ever published and is well worth your time)…

(Anyone think that WB having official movie preproduction blogs is awesome? I didn’t notice when they started doing that… It’s running on MT3. Also, they have an official Flickr stream too!)

Update: I tracked down and read all three major versions of the Watchmen scripts online: the horrible Hamm version, the much lauded Hayter version, and a draft of the Tse revision (based off the Hayter script) that Snyder is shooting with. Although it’s been much maligned in online reviews, I think the Tse revision actually made a lot of improvements to Hayter’s – it’s better paced, a lot of clunky dialogue and devices are dropped, and overall it gets the tone of the Watchmen a lot better, while keeping Hayter’s main accomplishment – a core structure that is both faithful to the original story and that also works as a filmic narrative. If you want to read a good summary of the different versions (spoilers of course), there’s a good comparison @ io9. I threw in my 2 cents on the main thing I didn’t like about the Tse draft.