The movie industry is once again well-represented at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, with several high-profile comic book adaptations making their pitch to Hollywood's newly annointed tastemakers, the fanboys. And while panels for big-name titles like Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk are garnering their share of interest, the project generating the most buzz among fanboys is one that's unlikely to elicit anything more than a puzzled look among casual movie fans. Watchmen, based on Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel about a motley crew of retired costumed crimefighters brought back into action by the murder of a former associate, hasn't even begun filming and it's already one of the most anticipated films of 2008.

Tasked with job of translating Watchmen to the big screen is 300 director Zack Snyder. Snyder, who dazzled attendees of last year's Comic-Con when he debuted his trailer for his stylized Spartan epic, is expected to introduce the cast of Watchmen at this year's event, and fansites across the web have been ablaze for months with speculation regarding prospective stars.

A Long Time Coming

Snyder's upcoming panel represents a milestone of sorts for a project many thought would never come to fruition. Watchmen's big-screen roots are long and splintered, dating all the way back to 1986, when producer Joel Silver first acquired the film rights for Lawrence Gordon Productions. Since then, the project has passed through virtually every major studio, with Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass among those attached to direct at various points in its history. Before Snyder arrived and heroically picked up the baton last year, it seemed that Watchmen was consigned to forever toil in that dark and terrible place known in Hollywood as "development hell."

Why has Watchmen, a movie just about everyone in Hollywood has wanted to make at some point or another, had so much difficulty making the leap to celluloid?

Not Just Another Comic Book

Bloated budgets, studio politics, shifting trends and fickle stars are just a few of the potential problems that that can serve to derail a project before a single frame is ever shot. And while all of those elements can be said to have played a part in Watchmen's many false starts, the bulk of the blame lies in the breadth and complexity of the source material. In many ways, Watchmen is the Ulysses of graphic novels -- dense, complicated, requiring multiple readings to be fully understood. And like James Joyce's literary masterpiece, Watchmen has long been considered impossible to accurately translate to film.

Even if one excises the exposition that traditionally comprises much of any comic book's dialogue, Watchmen is an extraordinarily wordy work, containing panel after panel of conversations loaded with subtext. Even the most seemingly inconsequential exchanges between characters contain vital bits of information that come into play later in the story; Snyder and screenwriter Alex Tse will have an extraordinarily difficult time pinpointing cuts that won't detract from the narrative.

Moore devotes a huge portion of his text to developing his characters, laying the foundations of Watchmen's elaborate mythology and explaining how the advent of superheros altered world history -- elements that can't be glossed over with a creative montage or two. Indeed, in a March interview with ReelzChannel.com, Snyder revealed that the latest draft of the script numbered at a hefty 150 pages, not including Tales of the Black Freighter, Watchmen's story-within-a-story. Add it all together and you've got a potential running time of over three hours -- enough to scare the hell out of anyone not named Peter Jackson.

Time Travel

But there's more than just the preponderance of dialogue that makes adapting the graphic novel so difficult. Moore relies heavily on flashbacks to tell his story, the bulk of which takes place over the course of about four decades. While this approach is perfectly suitable for comic books, it doesn't work nearly as well in film. Excessive flashbacks can render a film completely incoherent, confusing movie audiences accustomed to more straightforward storytelling. It also places a great deal of pressure on the actors, some of whom will have to portray characters at several different stages of life.

Tales of the Black Freighter

Tales of the Black Freighter is a story-within-a-story about an island castaway who steadily loses his mind while attempting to return home -- using a raft made of corpses -- in time to warn his town of an impending attack by pirates. The story, which consists primarily of a single character talking to himself (think of Tom Hanks' Cast Away, except much, much darker), is largely metaphorical, and one that most script doctors would instantly target for deletion. Snyder, however, is committed to retaining Black Freighter -- a decision that will please hardcore fans but could alienate mainstream moviegoers.

Welcome to Green Screen NYC

The challenges of adapting Watchmen won't end at the script stage. The story's diverse and often exotic settings -- ranging New York City to Vietnam to Antarctica -- have proved in the past to be a major stumbling block for studio execs leery of the budget requirements of shooting a visual effects-heavy film across several expensive locations.

Snyder should be able to keep the costs at a reasonable level by shooting almost entirely on green screen, as he did to brilliant effect with 300. It's unclear however, whether Watchmen's aesthetics are conducive to a green-screen approach. This isn't a hyper-stylized version of ancient Sparta (or a galaxy far, far away, for that matter) that we're talking about. Much of the point of Moore's story is that it takes place in the real world -- albeit one with an alternate historical timeline. Can a green screen effectively recreate the jungles of Vietnam in the '60s or the streets of New York City in the '80s?

President Nixon?

While previous directors have sought to modernize Watchmen's Cold War-era narrative with a setting more suitable to the current socio-political climate, Snyder opted to remain in the '80s, arguing that any departure would destroy the essence of Moore's story. And he's absolutely correct.

When the Watchmen comic debuted in 1986, the prospect of nuclear annihilation (via Mutually Assured Destruction) was a very real and very frightening possibility. Indeed, it's that fear that drives much of the plot. In Watchmen's 1986 alternative-history America, Richard Nixon is still in office, serving a fifth consecutive term thanks to a repeal of the 23rd Amendment. Nixon's immense popularity due largely to the intervention of costumed heroes in key conflicts like Vietnam, where they led U.S. troops to a swift and decisive victory. By 1986, the fabled Doomsday Clock is nearing midnight, and the U.S. is locked in a tense standoff with the Soviet Union. With a full-blown war deemed all but inevitable, a sense of impending doom afflicts most of the characters in Moore's graphic novel.

But when the real-world's Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the specter of nuclear war -- a national obsession for over four decades -- virtually disappeared from the collective consciousness soon thereafter. There's no modern-day equivalent to the kind of apocalyptic fears that faced the population back then. Even the oft-discussed threat of a terrorist's "dirty bomb" doesn't arouse anything close to the kind of anxiety and paranoia felt during the height of the Cold War.

Contemporary audiences, especially the teenagers that helped make 300 a blockbuster, may have a difficult time relating to these themes. And let's face it: a great deal of them will probably have no idea who Richard Nixon is.

It's Been Done

Part of what made Watchmen so revolutionary was Moore's realistic depiction of his heroes as thoroughly flawed beings, with psychological profiles far more complex than any seen before in a comic. Plagued by all sorts of neuroses, the costumed heroes of the Watchmen universe were every bit as dysfunctional as the villains they pursued.

Nowadays, thanks largely to the influence of Moore and his equally esteemed contemporary, Frank Miller, flawed heroes (and anti-heroes) have basically become the norm, both in comics and on-screen. The array of comic-book flicks released over the last decade is a testament to Moore's and Miller's impact: Christopher Nolan's Batman is dark and brooding; Sam Raimi's Spider-Man is awkward and angst-ridden; Bryan Singer's X-Men are alienated and conflicted, Ang Lee's Hulk is plagued by all sorts of weird oedipal issues, and so on. Even the venerable James Bond hopped on the bandwagon recently with his decidedly darker turn in last year's gritty Casino Royale.

Brad Bird's 2004 animated classic The Incredibles, with its middle-aged, out of shape superheroes brought out of retirement, can be said to be a humorous, family-friendly take on the Watchmen narrative. Bird basically admitted as much, sprinkling several subtle nods to Watchmen throughout his film.

Too Faithful?

Fanboys are famously intolerant of even the smallest departures from the cherished canon of their comic book universe. Snyder won major accolades in the fanboy community for his faithful adaptation of 300, but that very same devotion to the source material could be Snyder's undoing in the case of Watchmen. A large segment of the moviegoing public will arrive in theaters anticipating Watchmen to be another big-budget popcorn flick, not a complex, multi-layered deconstruction of the hero archetype.

Watchmen is set to begin shooting this September in Vancouver, and ReelzChannel.com will be keeping a close eye on on the film as it heads toward a late 2008 release.

Be sure to check out ReelzChannel.com's 2007 Comic-Con page for breaking Watchmen news, as well as all the highlights from this year's event.