Watchmen has a Trailer

by VM

It's the biggest selling graphic novel of all time. It's commonly referred to as the greatest story every told in Comics. It's coming to the big screen and prior to that we now have a trailer. Are we excited?

And since it's Bat-Week, we'll ask his surrogate, Nite Owl.


...oh dear. He doesn't look happy does he? Still, onwards!


So what do we think? It's hard to know what to think from a trailer these days. Comic Book trailers are always a bit difficult to judge, especially from the perspective of people so close to the source material, plus it seems to be possible to make Anything look good for two minutes. And is there really anyone who can see something like this with fresh eyes if they've read the graphic novel? Can we hope to be even mildly objective about something we love?

So having admitted the bias first off I have to say... I'm optimistic.




It looks pretty. It looks dark, and grimy and potentially quite nasty. WATCHMEN isn't a nice story a lot of the time and it does appear that they're going with that; Seeing Dr Manhattan vaporising a Viet Cong soldier probably isn't that politically correct, but having it in the film indicates they're hopefully being pretty faithful to the source material. In fact, all the visuals - in a slightly stylised manner - seem to be in the right sort of place. Dr Manhattan in particular seems spot on.



Well, mostly. Silk Specter looks possibly a bit too kewl. And Nite Owl doesn't appear to be fat. And it's somewhat disappointing they've gone for a song over the whole thing - for something as grand as this could and possibly should be it's a shame there's no orchestral score sweeping around it. And what's with Comedian punching a hole in the wall? How is a normal man supposed to do that?



But despite these niggles, I'm inclined to be optimistic. Nothing leaps out at me as fundamentally wrong at this point. Certainly, there are obviously compromises but that was a given. What's possibly more important is that at this point I look at that trailer and think 'that could work'. It might not, of course and there's still the Alan Moore curse to contend with that seems to dictate none of his work will ever be adapted well for the big screen. But there are definitely reasons to be cautiously optimistic.

Now, go on. Go make up your own mind.