Holding out for a (super) hero

The cast includes Billy Crudup as the all-blue Dr Manhattan, middle, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as The Comedian, far left and Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II, second from left. Photo / Supplied

When the long-awaited film of Watchmen is finally released on Thursday, the most important name of all will be missing from the credits.

Alan Moore, the celebrated author of the original D.C. Comics series has distanced himself from director Zack Snyder's cinematic adaptation.

Serialised in monthly instalments between 1986 and 1987, before being collected into a graphic novel with illustrations by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen has since sold more than a million copies. It ranks as one of the most iconic superhero tales of all time, winning a Hugo Award in 1988 and being proclaimed by Time magazine in 2005 as "one of the hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present".

Set in an alternate 1980s where America won the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon is still President, Watchmen centres around a band of retired superheroes who are reunited by the murder of one of their number. Renowned for his massive, extensively detailed scripts, Moore was praised for the revisionist, realistic approach that he brought to the usually juvenile genre, declaring at the time that he wanted to create "a Moby Dick of superheroes, something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density."

Watchmen was first optioned in 1986 by producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver, who hired several writers to pen unsuccessful screenplays. When Brazil director Terry Gilliam came on board in the early 1990s, he asked the British-born Moore what he would do if he were to turn Watchmen into a film, to which he replied, "Well actually, if anybody asked me, I would have said 'I wouldn't'."

The erstwhile Python agreed, concluding that it was "inherently unfilmable" and its complex storyline would better suit a five-hour mini-series than a two-and-a-half hour movie. Watchmen is not the first of Moore's opuses to make it to the big screen: that accolade falls to the Hughes brothers' patchy 2001 version of From Hell. An exhaustive retelling of the Jack The Ripper case, its labyrinthine plot proved too unwieldy for the twins, who cast Johnny Depp as the drug-addicted Inspector Abberline. It was certainly of no interest to the reclusive author, who rarely leaves his home town of Northampton, England.

"It's not to in any way denigrate the work of the people involved with the films but they're not necessarily connected to my books other than through the titles," he says. "I don't get time to go out and see any films - or anybody for that matter."

Moore admits cinema is not his favourite medium. "There are plenty of brilliant films that I've enjoyed but I tend to find film a bit of an overwhelming media," he says.

"There are lots of artificial restraints in film that I don't have to deal with in a book or comic. With From Hell, the Hughes brothers didn't stand a hope in hell of capturing the book, which is 600 pages long. Even if you don't read the appendices, it will take you four to five hours to read. So to make a film of two hours max you'll have to excise more than half the material. I think that things should be left in their original forms."

Moore was even less impressed with Stephen Norrington's dire League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, released in 2003, which saw archetypal Victorian heroes such as the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo and Nina Harker teaming up. And while his relationship with Hollywood was previously at least cordial, it soon turned hostile after he was embroiled in a lawsuit when a screenwriter sued film-makers 20th Century Fox, claiming that they and Moore had stolen the central idea from him. Moore resolved to henceforth "take the high ground on the issue" by refusing all future payments and removing his name from films made of his D.C. Comics titles, starting with 2005's ambitious V For Vendetta.

After more than a decade of inactivity, Gordon and Silver recruited X-Men screenwriter David Hayter in 2001 to revise the Watchmen script. Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) and then Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) were attached to direct before the film stalled yet again.

Finally it moved closer to becoming a reality when Snyder, who cut his teeth on pop videos and tackled his first comic book movie by adapting Frank Miller's Spartan epic 300, was confirmed as director.

Filming began in Vancouver in mid-2007 with Almost Famous' Billy Crudup as the all-powerful (and blue) Dr Manhattan, Brideshead Revisited's Matthew Goode as the super-intelligent Ozymandias, and Grey's Anatomy's dead Denny - Jeffrey Dean Morgan - as The Comedian (like Captain America, only nastier).

Although many of the graphic novel's sub-plots have been condensed, Snyder has reportedly stayed true to the spirit of the book by recreating the look of the original art. He has certainly won the approval of Gibbons who, unlike Moore, has been involved in the production.

The comic-book artist believes that Watchmen has "a different mindset to the other adaptations" and that if his former collaborator was to see the film, "which he probably won't," it would be the one that he "would be least displeased with".

Early buzz is promising, but Moore certainly hasn't softened his stance. He recently told the LA Times that cinema audiences are like "freshly hatched birds looking up with their mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something different? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."

* Certainly there will be plenty of hungry mouths lining up when Watchmen opens on Thursday.