Head ringing from Film Freak Central's exoneration of The Dark Knight, I wandered around looking for the Watchmen trailer. I saw it here. It may be down by the time you read this.
Watchmen, as a film property, has limped around Hollywood for decades. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' labyrinthine master-comic charts a self-contained continuity of masked crime-fighters, Richard Nixon, an atomic superman, a brutal murder, and a 1980s world teetering on the edge of an all-out nuclear exchange. 400 pages. 9 panels on most. Terry Gilliam called it unfilmable. Solid Snake voicer David Hayter couldn't help but 'update' it. Paul Greengrass' vision got lost in a corporate re-shuffle. The job fell to Zack Snyder.
Pop video director Snyder managed to quite successfully marry an Aliens siege / flee action narrative to his speeding Dawn of the Dead remake, before his director's cut embellished some rather tasteless homophobia. His follow-up, a seizure edit monument to fascism called 300, is reviewed here. Although I do quite like 300, Mr Snyder's film did utterly fail to underscore the inherent irony present in Miller and Varney's text - fascist Spartans championing democracy. A trait widely held as a wrong-headed imperialist oversight by reviewers not intimately acquainted with the comic. If a grey shade like that slipped under his radar, how could he possibly adapt a work as obsessively layered and textured as Watchmen?
Obviously, as with all trailers, this is nothing more than a tweaked-to-perfection image collage mood enhancer; but at least it points to a retention of teeth. Vietnam's in the film in all its mega-man march glory - 100% less penis though. Manhattan's doppelganger sexuality is alluded to. Comedian has the resigned gaze of an accomplished murderer. Rorschach towers and hates. And the Mars palace rises out of the ground as The Smashing Pumpkins' The Beginning is The End is The Beginning winds down into clockwork doomsday. I really hope the film proper is that good.
I'd start pining for a hypothetically perfect screen interpretation of The Dark Knight Returns, but it sounds like Christopher Nolan has already delivered.
Using that song lent the trailer an epic-ness and sense of apocolypse the images do not share, so unfair as god damn I cannot stop watching it!
ReplyDeleteHe did the same thing with using NIN in the 300 trailer which also lent it an epic-ness that was sorely missed in the actual film.
Do you not think? I thought the images were absolutely apocalyptic - people rioting whilst superheroes exterminate technolgically inferior Asians.
ReplyDeleteMy favourite bit though: "God help us" on black, cut to Manhatten finally pulling himself together.
The ingredients are there in that the images are dark (as they should be) but they're also very sound-stagey. The mood for them totally comes from the song, I'd probably laugh at the trailer if they used something else.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely perfect choice just like the NIN one for 300 was, the guy knows his music.
I'm thinking about the few clips of vietnam we saw and how grim it was, just as I'd want it. But! Can you imagine that scene with some standard score over it rather than than the pumpkins? I think I'd probably piss myself.
The "and I'll whisper...no." gave me a chill though. Do you know if there's his V.O. for the film? There fucking better be!
Ah man, I would hope Rorschach talks all over the film.
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