Worry not, fans of brutal superheroes: The rape that's central to Watchmen's complex character dynamics will be featured in the movie without any censorship. Maybe just the opposite, in fact.
Talking to MTV, Jeffrey Dean Morgan - who plays the Comedian in Zack Snyder's movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic comic - said that the scene where his character is discovered raping Carla Gugino's Silk Spectre wasn't an easy one to shoot:
It was a three-day process shooting that particular scene, and it was hard... It was three of the hardest days of filming I have ever had to do. It was really very violent.
Violent, you may be thinking? Wasn't it kind of... understated in the original comic? Well, yes, but certain liberties have to be taken in adapting things into movies, Morgan explained:
When you're looking at the comic book you only get a couple panels so there is a lot of stuff there that needs to be filled in, so we fill in the blanks there between three and four panels, and it turns out to be one hell of a violent scene. And it's all intact, [Hooded Justice] comes in and interrupts the attempted rape - it's all there. We stayed very loyal to it, and I haven't actually seen the scene yet, but I did see a piece of playback when we were filming it and it's a lot... It's rated ‘R' for a reason.
Call it a suspicious nature, but the glibness of "it's rated 'R' for a reason" (or, for that matter, Gugino calling the scene "pretty crazy" last year) concerns me for some reason. Am I really the only one who's worried that "filling in" things between panels is going to equal a glossy, sensationalistic gratuitous scene in this case..?
‘Watchmen' Actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan On Film's Rape Scene: ‘It's Rated ‘R' For A Reason' [MTV Splash Page]