Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut

A compromised pirate themed draft of that bloodied, iconic smiley; key art that proudly and inaccurately boasts 'The Complete Story'; a four disc added-value Blu-Ray box set heaving with various re-edits and flash glide stagings of the original Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons text. It must be the holiday season. Compiled from various antiquated straight-to-market shelf fillers, the juice in this US only set is yet another version of Zack Snyder's feature. This newly compiled 215 minute print of Watchmen finds further time to digress, widening its sphere of interests to include street level news vendor chatter, and a drifting meta-text.

The animated Tales of the Black Freighter movie has been woven into the feature, mostly in isolation. We aren't treated to Gerard Butler voicing bleak, situationally specific introspections over pre-Giuliani New York. Instead the segments are chaptered into the feature on downtime, usually jumping off from a trip to the newsstand. Bleed-in is minimal, the only non-diegetic intrusion comes from an agitated Silk Spectre II, apparently urging the circling Freighter to wind down a little quicker to allow her a character moment. This brief dialogue intrusion highlights something of a tonal mismatch. The inclusion of this animated Freighter adds another less intended layer of deconstruction. Butler rabidly racing through largely undoctored Moore text is an excitement way out of most of live action cast's range. Disappointing then, but not completely without merit.

While for much of the duration the Freighter segments only obliquely contrast the main movie narrative - they tend instead to operate on a pitch black comedic agenda - a place is found for the pitiless conclusion. Inserted immediately prior to Ozymandias' big reveal, the fate of the mariner neatly undercuts any test audience tinkering in the main feature. In this context, the Black Freighter interludes are explicitly and retroactively positioned as Adrian Veidt's unconscious noodling on his mission, granting the character a head-space he is denied elsewhere. Freighter drains Veidt's 'victory' of even the barest sense of triumph, giving the film's conclusion some much needed mutation. The discovery of Rorschach's diary at the right-wing rag headquarters now plays less like a gag, and more like it did in the original comic: a tiny cog springing to life in a deliberate, unknowable machine. The use here of Freighter falls short of Moore and Gibbons' weaving multi-lead commentary, but it does patch a nagging hole in Snyder's interpretation. As ultimate a cut as we're likely to get.

Watchmen: Director's Cut

Zack Snyder's long trumpeted Watchmen: Director's Cut finally arrives. There's little indication if this is Snyder's preferred edit, or a just a cash-in that has been rolled out to keep the property fresh. It doesn't help that there's another longer edit on the horizon either. That said, away from inflated, possessive expectation, Snyder's film fares a little better. Director's Cuts always threaten a transformative quality. An incomplete thesis made whole by the addition of discarded, mutant material. Great examples include the identity crisis dreamscape introduced to Blade Runner, or the maternal angst added to Aliens. Both a digression too far for cinema screening. Unfortunately, the term is massively devalued now, bandied about for every other teen-baiting head wringer desperate to court extra sell-through sales on home video. Knowing that Watchmen's alien invasion ending wasn't even filmed does take the shine off proceedings - despite early reports indicating that Cloverfield monster man Neville Page was on the case. In that sense the film will always be 'imperfect'.

The earliest additions to this Watchmen are witless, violent inflections that stall flow and further paint these street avengers as X-types. Nuance does, eventually, begin to creep in though. Rorschach's fevered narration is finally allowed to digress into the bigoted, a crucial character trait that coasted on the big screen. Laurie's memories of a father prickle earlier too, while Nite Owl II loses it with a (relative) innocent. Best of all is Hollis Mason's bow-out, a straining Queensbury box against otaku thugs intercut with brief recollections of the enemies he vanquished in his heyday. Unfortunately, Snyder can't help cuing up Pietro Mascagni's Intermezzo, from the opera Cavalleria rusticana, famous for scoring Scorsese's Raging Bull. I'm still not sure if these music choices are designed to stress archetypes, or a desire to position Watchmen: The Movie as a work built out of the scraps of an auteur-focused Hollywood that likely wouldn't have existed in this timeline. No Vietnam loss means no introspective 1970s. Either way, it's still rather flawed in execution. Recognisable music attributed to an incongruous image creates a hurdle. Are we supposed to be patting ourselves on the back for recognising the reference? Or chuckling at the co-opt? Regardless, isn't that breaking scene?

Most disappointing of all is the continued lack of an origin story, or sequence, for Matthew Goode's Ozymandias. On a second viewing, Watchmen's fragmented narrative displays a talent for exactly the immersive digression that Moore's text thrived on. A big screen portrayal of Veidt's journey into intellectual hubris would have made for a thrilling counterpoint to Osterman's filmed brushes with infinity. In both versions of the film currently available, Veidt is far too functionary. A rootless sort who haunts the film's fringes, displaying an obvious air of menace that somewhat blows the impending twist. Maybe the Black Freighter bleed-in will bolster this angle? The tale informing the predicament Veidt finds himself in? Regardless, Snyder's Watchmen has become easier to admire on subsequent rolls. There's less inclination to call foul on the many deletions and alterations. In particular, the exaggerated hyper-violence becomes recognisable as a counter-point to contemporary super-fiction films. It's a shade rougher, mirroring the position that the original comic took. Snyder's film is a faithful but graceless adaptation of material specifically designed to be anti-translation. It hasn't been beaten and tweaked to resemble a knives n' knickers blockbuster, thankfully. Despite many vulgar choices, Snyder's Watchmen is still a rambling digression on thrill-seeking thugs, and the people who watch them.

Sketch Saturday: Doctor Manhattan

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' very own quantum superman. From Watchmen, natch.

Trying to Watch Watchmen

Heads up! Despite some smug assurance to the contrary, it has become apparent that Paramount Home Video have no present intention to release Zack Snyder's Director's Cut of Watchmen on DVD or Blu-Ray in the UK. The Blighty issue, due July 27th, contains the theatrical minting of Mr Snyder's adaptation only. The reasoning behind such a move is unclear: perhaps extended editions were not covered under Paramount's European distribution deal? Or perhaps they're just completely incompetent? Also excluded from our BD pressing is a bleeding edge video-in-video commentary track, featuring all manner of medium defining gee-whizzery. Ho hum. Luckily for the import minded consumer, the US Director's Cut publisher Warners have a long standing aversion to assigning Blu-Ray region locking. May such practices continue!

Watch (More?) Watchmen

Paramount UK are teasing with a set date for multiple Watchmen DVD and Blu-Ray releases, no solid word on which version of the film you'll be ponying up for though. The cads! Will we be offered the extended Director's Cut immediately? Or can we expect a nefarious drag-out launch with milestone releases scattered down the unfolding year? Fingers crossed for the former, although I think we can expect the complete 'graphic novel' edition with integrated animation elements to be held over for a Christmas double-dip. Prove me wrong Paramount! Although a deeply flawed take on Moore and Gibbons' tights and fights (review here), I have been hankering to give Zack Snyder's take another spin. For all the dribbling brutality, Snyder did manage a sucker punch or two.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter carried a story yesterday about the US Warner Bros Blu-Ray edition of Watchmen carrying a live synch-up commentary option for Facebook pals. Really Warners, you spoil us. Social networking claptrap aside, the article confirms Watchmen's home video release schedule. Expect the theatrical edition on a single disc release, with the Director's Cut on two disc DVD and Blu-Ray. I shouldn't think Paramount will go to the trouble to create it's own platter. Gratefully port! No word on the Black Freighter edition though, Christmas I tells ya!

Tales of the Black Freighter

Snaking in and out of key moments in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is a Brecht bleak pirate yarn from in-universe comic Tales of the Black Freighter. A marooned mariner desperately tries to make his way home ahead of the nightmarish Black Freighter, an enormous galleon that doubles as a roaming, ship-sacking, hell-thing. Stranded in hungry waters, the sailor plumbs deplorable depths to try and survive long enough to save his family and town - apparently next on the Freighter's hit list. Designed to comment on and contrast the actions of the various leads, Black Freighter is yet another layer to an obsessively composed fiction.

Quite unable to feasibly work in a live action element that reflects this metafictioning, the producers of Watchmen: The Movie hit upon the idea of rendering it as a simultaneous released DVD animated movie. In theory it keeps the fans happy, whilst happily existing as self-perpetuating product, taking up shelf space in HMV and Borders as purchasable advertising. It's the same model that saw Batman: Gotham Knight crowding shop space in light of The Dark Knight's cinema release. Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter, as the DVD press release trumpets it, needn't be any good; which means it is all the more exciting that it is good. Very good, in fact.

This Black Freighter tale can proudly stand alongside the For the Man Who Has Everything episode of Justice League Unlimited as superior examples of Alan Moore adaptations. Gerard Butler's manic performance as the sailor spews out largely unmolested tract, lingering on the detail and incident of a rapidly maddening mind. The narration a pounding motor, driving a psychologically abusive overview of this hero's suffering. Liberties have been taken elsewhere, the role of First Mate Ridley has been greatly expanded, becoming a projected counterpoint to the Captain's decaying faculties. An understandable embellishment considering the tiny amount of actual panel room attributed to the story. Flying under the money-man radar, animated Black Freighter - like the aforementioned JLU episode - is left tonally intact, with only minor structural tailoring for a new medium.

A few too-crisp colours aside, this short thankfully does not possess the bright, pastel breeziness of modern computer afflicted animation. Instead, Black Freighter is awash with pitiless blacks and rotting greens. It's a departure from John Higgins' luminously putrid four-colour work on the comic, but well in keeping with the found item mandate that hangs over this and the Under The Hood documentary supplement. Likewise, Dave Gibbons' minutely composed figures are gone too, replaced with an in-era animation work that recalls European long form works like 1981's Heavy Metal. The relentless grue on display only adds to this effect, perfectly presenting Black Freighter as some long out-of-print video nasty. Tales of the Black Freighter is twenty odd minutes of near intolerable horror. You couldn't ask for more.

We are promised that at some stage in the near future this animated short will be woven into the larger form of Snyder's Watchmen, for a bells and whistles Ultimate Edition set. It's difficult to see how that could work, both tonally and mechanically. Are we literally going to dive into the newsstand patron's confused train of thought as he muddles through the impenetrable comic? Bernie, the reader, repeatedly states that he's straining to make any sense of his chosen pamphlet (perhaps a Moore aside about his audience?). I shouldn't think quite that much nitpicking consideration has gone into this decision, it is just another way to placate any fans left wanting by the film. As if straining to fit even more adaptation into the movie will somehow make it a more worthwhile endeavour.

Frankly, from this position of total final edit ignorance, it seems a disservice to both mediums. It perpetuates the strangled notion that comics are simply printed storyboards just begging to be enlivened with Hollywood money. On the motion picture end of things, it's an incongruous cartoon forcing its way in, interrupting the film's already idiosyncratic narrative. In-joke asides for the ruthlessly pigheaded. Does Watchmen: The Movie need thirty minutes of bleed-in animated misery? Or should this adaptation be allowed to stand on its own terms? I think this tale from the Black Freighter is quite capable of the latter. I will admit though, it would be a kick to hear Butler's agitated ramblings ringing out over boiling point 1980s New York. If it simply has to be in another edit, Black Freighter should bleed into the film, rather than interrupt it.

I was originally going to close out this review bemoaning the unethical business practices on DC's behalf that have put paid to us seeing anymore such work. Moore was rumoured to be interested in expanding a line of Black Freighter titles as a concession to DC's sequel demands. The comic world sincerely needs a putrid, frothing, pirate serial and Moore was well placed to deliver. With my thinking cap on though, it seems quite apparent that a lot of these ribald impulses have found their way into Moore's Kevin O'Neill collaboration The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The forthcoming three issue volume Century respins The Threepenny Opera as an unfolding horror, for example. Besides that, I'm also looking forward to taking receipt of the first issue of Jamie Delano and Max Fiumara's alarming new seven seas serial Rawbone. Read Joe McCulloch's review here.

There's more tales in that Black Freighter.

"Christ almighty, it's the goddamned Watchmen!"

Terrorists are going to blow up Lady Liberty's brains! If you found Zack Snyder's fisticuffs take on Watchmen a trifle galling, wait until you read Sam Hamm's 1988 draft. Yikes! Highlights include a bungled terror take-down leading to the superhero cock-block, Rorschach literally being a quipping Connery-mold action hero, and Veidt's masterwork becoming a spot of time tunneling. Burton Batman scripter Hamm was briefly on-project when Fox were flirting with bank-rolling the film. Joel Silver was producing, with Ahnoldt Schwarzenegger in mind for nuclear physicist Dr Manhattan - no word if he was to be dubbed for the sake of understanding anything that was coming out of his mouth, a' la Hercules in New York. All this was pre-Terry Gilliam, who immediately tossed Hamm's script out the window when he signed on. Hamm's script is quite the cultural artefact - Watchmen viewed through an 80s action prism. All snarky declarations, and postured threats. "They'd better!"

For dessert, here's a brief discourse on the changes Warners asked Snyder to make. Warner Brothers are not in the business of depth! It's a miracle anything even remotely good gets made isn't it?

Watchmen

Sitting there with Zack Snyder's $150 million adaptation of Watchmen unfolding, I couldn't shake an anecdote told by Paul Thomas Anderson on his Boogie Nights DVD commentary. Anderson recounts the initial public screening, and the unfortunate crowd reaction to William H Macy's character finally snapping, and murdering, his philandering porn star wife:

"The first time we showed this movie to an audience was in Westwood, sort of a college town, UCLA is there, and it was the first preview of the movie. We're showing the movie, everybody's going along, they're having a good time. It's the first half of the movie, it's fun, it's great. Everybody's dancing. 'Oh! Disco music! We love it! Look at the funny clothes and the hair!' You know? And this scene comes up and Macy goes to get the gun, and when he got the gun, you have to keep in mind recruited audiences are just sort of maniacs in general, they're all pumped up with a false description of the movie.

Anyway, they're there, Macy gets the gun and this crowd of college kids cheers when he gets the gun. Now, I sank in my seat you know? I sank in my seat and I thought, well, what have I done? I have really, really fucked up. I've done something wrong in storytelling, I've guided this towards being a funny moment somehow, but it's not what I intended. How did I do this? I really started to panic. And actually my friend Aimee Mann who is just brilliant, one of my idols, was sitting next to me. She, actually we've had major conversations about violence in movies and this sort of things and she was sitting there and she just sort of grabbed my hand and said: 'Not your fault'. But it didn't matter. I sank in my seat.

Now, then he shoots them, and they cheered even louder, and I sank even further in my seat and I thought well I have fucked up big time. I have ruined this. How did this happen? And I can't possibly fix it, this is one big long shot. Well then Macy walks out and he shot himself in the face, and they shut the fuck up real quick. They weren't laughing, and they weren't cheering, and it was dead silence, and I thought good. Okay. I've done my job okay. It's them that's fucked up. You know? It's really the moment where you blame the audience: 'no, you're wrong.' All he did was got a gun, I didn't tip my hat towards this, and I'm glad you got punished by him shooting himself because you liked Macy, and all this violent shit just happened, and don't cheer. Don't clap. It's not funny."

That's the biggest problem with Snyder's Watchmen. He wants you to cheer. He wants you to applaud Rorschach and The Comedian. He does not want to punish you for liking them. These two are cast as face value bad ass superstars. A glut of their rough, unseemly, edges are filed away, leaving vaguely relatable macho action heroes. Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach is no longer a giggling, racist crank. In his narrated jounal entries we get the blunt force declarations that end Moore's sentences, but none of the ambling black poetry that precedes them. His brief scenes with the psychiatrist are delivered as a series of punchlines. His origin is raced through, screened as justification, rather than the absolute destruction of a personality. Rorschach's origin shouldn't be a Saw scene with child abuse dressing, it should be the yawning emptiness a vengeful, play-acting detective finds in fighting real, hidden, criminality. It mutates him. In Snyder's film there's very little sense that a Kovacs personality ever existed.



Jeffrey Dean Morgan's magnetic Comedian gets off lightly too. He gets to soothsay, without any of the underlining character irony. He's telling the 'truth', rather than painting over his own blackness. Comedian's most despicable moment is quickly manoeuvred onto an attendant character. There's less sense in the film that he wanted to execute his Vietnamese lover and child, more that he was specifically testing Manhattan. To me, as written, it was an on-spot justification to hide behind. Another mask for Eddy. Implicating someone else less amorally advanced as he. Another jab at the geeky Superman. Comedian's other despicable act, assaulting Sally Jupiter, gains a few notes of violent pornography, the one-sided brutalising presented as a kind of foreplay that gets out of control. I'm not quite sure if that complicates the sequence, or just makes it even more revolting. Probably both.

A useful mirror to Boogie Nights' Macy scene would be how Comedian deals with a rioting American crowd. His slow-motion plunge hangs in the air for a moment, the surrounding mob stunned rigid. Comedian breaks the brief detente by lashing out at the nearest woman, and it can't help but feel like a chuckle prompt for brutes. Irrelevant to proceedings, the woman tumbles out of frame never to be seen again. Comedian quickly tires of thumping civilians and begins firing his shotgun wildly into the crowd. There are no reaction shots. You're allowed to enjoy his tirade as a moment of taboo breaking action. When the camera pulls out to survey the destruction there's not a single body lying on the floor. There are no consequences to these events what-so-ever. Victims have evaporated like useless, defeated video game baddies.



Moore and Gibbons' piece worked hard to punish the reader for revelling in costumed mayhem. Each hero archetype was pushed and pulled to terrifyingly logical conclusions. In broad (non-Charlton) terms, Superman is a flake, with no connection to humanity. Batman is split between a homicidal street person with deeply worrying personal convictions, and an impotent schlub terrified by his kink. If you want to like them, then fine, but you should at least understand where they're coming from.

Still, how much needling grey area can actually be expected in a blockbuster? Little boys need hero projections to dribble to, not disturbing, soulless monsters. Would Warners ever bankroll a Summer superhero flick specifically designed to make an audience feel like shit? Arguably, they already have with The Dark Knight, but wasn't it Heath Ledger's death that allowed Christopher Nolan carte blanche to push that film as far as he did? No moneyman is going to demand any of Ledger's scenes be dropped. Tabloids drum it into us that he effectively ended his life to play that role, and people want to see as much of it as possible. It helps that Batman has international brand recognition too, something the until now read-only Watchmen lacks.

It's no revelation to state that Snyder utterly lacks the command of Moore, but enough of the events are up there on screen that if newcomers genuinely want to look and puzzle, they'll arrive at most of the more dispiriting conclusions. As cack-handed as Snyder's take often is, he has at least dragged the tale's dark frothing frame onto the screen. He must have fought countless up-hill struggles with the studio to do so. Reel off the feature's defining characteristics, and it quickly begins to sound like box-office krypotonite: It has an adult rating. It's still set in 1985. Cold War politics are stressed. The 'villain' isn't punished. Heroes do dreadful things.



It's not Snyder's fidelity that's wanting, it's how he understood, and was allowed to communicate that understanding that cripples the picture. It's not quite getting that people shouldn't be thinking of other, better, movies during big moments scored with second-hand music. It's not understanding that the new ending only makes Hollywood foreshadowing sense. It's not comprehending that the sequel flirting teased out in the film's dying seconds makes flabbergasting dunderheads of your formally sympathetic leads.

There are a handful of sequences that sing and shine though. Chief among these is the Dylan scored collage that runs over the opening credits. The 1940s Minutemen exploits are captured in a string of Republic serial vignettes that mutate into this universe's vandalised super-history. We learn that costumed heroics have infected every inch of this world's twentieth century. Nat King Cole drifts wistfully over scenes of pitiless termination. Manhattan's time-out on Mars is allowed to exist as a piece of character embellishment, and nothing more. Billy Crudup recounts his fractured timeline with a bored, softly spoken detachment. Pity the callous, scorned God. There's even a moment in the roundly despised Nite Owl / Silk Spectre tryst that touches on something vaguely lyrical - the couple do eventually stop having slow-motion Showgirls sex, their forms becoming agitated and beastly. The camera lingers on Spectre's fetish boots - Dan's kink going unpunished. For a brief moment it almost feels like an adult made this film.

Alan Moore reads Rorschach

One last stab at Watchmen before I see it, and hopefully get a review out. Here's Alan Moore narrating Rorschach's journal. Unfortunately Jackie Earle Haley's interpretation seems to have gotten stuck somewhere between Clint growl, and Bale's Batman sneer. Never mind. The author's reading is alive with prowling, despondent, psychosis. I wonder how much of this will be used in the film? It's wonderfully punishing to listen to. If you're not completely selling the character as deeply damaged, as Moore is here, the word tumbling could come off as a sixth form stab at hard boiled 'tec talk.



Best as I can tell, the images are from the recent minimalist animation Motion Comic piece, chatter sourced from The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary.

Free Play! Watchmen: The End is Nigh

Under review is the demo version available on Xbox Live. I have little interest in forking out for the full episode. We were promised something along the lines of Mayfair's largely forgotten Who Watches the Watchmen? role playing scenario. That game, an award winning Alan Moore collaboration, featured minor Minuteman Captain Metropolis bungling a clandestine scheme to draw the abortive Crimebusters team together. Machiavelli he ain't. What did we get instead? Squaresoft's The Bouncer, oozing warts and all, in Snyderverse drag. Ho hum! So out goes everyone's favourite homosexual racist Nelson Gardner (and all attendant side-story manoeuvering), in comes grime sheen interpretations of Nite Owl II and Rorschach, battling up and down nondescript prisonscapes. Lead pipes, and fun, perpetually out of reach.

That's right, Deadline games have chosen to interpret Moore and Gibbons' obsessively layered monument to detail as that simplest of gaming genres: the scrolling brawler. The studio have also elected to execute this transition with a complete absence of flair, presenting a game that is mechanically shallow even when compared to 1989's Neanderthal example Final Fight. To their credit, Deadline did remember to mix up the rote thumping with the occasional switch pull sequence. Remember folks, pressing buttons in sequence with on-screen prompts counts as puzzle solving! What generosity!

Players choose between Dreiberg and Kovacs, a slither of differences existing between the characters; a two player option is also available. Snyder actors Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley have recorded some dialogue snatches scattered about gameplay, the exchanges casting Moore's characters as a thug take on Hawk and Dove. Kovacs spills laboured right-winging rhetoric, while Dreiberg bumbles around lefty tract. It's both a nice nod to Rorschach's Ditko derived beginnings, and a chronic mishandling of Moore's text. Indigestion bubbled when Nite Owl started to fall-in with Rorschach's confused 'fuck everybody!' mutterings.

Also worth mentioning is the motion comic cut-scene sequence in which a faithfully rendered (lifted?) Dave Gibbons' Rorschach interacts with the movie design Nite Owl II. It's rather strange seeing the rounded, naturalistic Gibbons' figure in such close proximity to the spiky Bat flavoured redesign. Flat and unexciting for the most part, the short is at least faithful to John Higgins' bold, poisonous palette.

Watchmen: The End is Nigh's only real highlight is the effect suffering repeated beatings has on the in-game camera - the view cants as if the player were deep in a 60s Batman supervillain liar. Grasping, I know. File under Stink, for Stinker.

Judge, Jury & Executioner!

No! Not late 70s Joe Dredd, it's yet another Watchmen viral!



Seems a shame to not have a full Columbia serial series out of those fantastic Minutemen suits. Who doesn't want to see bite-size chunks of Hooded Justice agitatedly clobbering some no-good purse snatcher to death? Hopefully we'll get a full trailer for the Tales of the Black Freighter animated movie soon too.

"Better Blue Than Red!"

Big in Japan: Watchmen

Actually, I can't imagine it is - the comic anyway. I'm sure they'll have a shit fit for the big bright light motion picture though. I digress, this is how Warners is selling Watchmen: The Movie to Japan. No The Smashing Pumpkins, and little in the way of yawn-motion action; instead Japanese cats are treated to comic-skewing false history reels. What Moore implied is rendered moving. See! The Comedian delinquent about history! Was that your head Mr Kennedy? See! The sun set on Castro! - I can't help but feel they missed a 60s black-op trick by not having him paw at his wilting, CIA irradiated beard.

Trailer Japan marks the mood somewhere at costumed political potboiler, likely of a 70s vintage. The central investigation is given serious, methodical sell-time! It's a sharp contrast to the slow-seizure-shills that have done the rounds this side of the world - we've instead been treated to endless Where's Wally? money shots: "Did your favourite bit make it into the trailer?"

Good lord! It's like they're actually trying to sell a piece of narrative film-making! The most encouraging footage yet, by a clear margin.

"...You're locked up in here with me."

Here's the Scream Awards Watchmen tease Snyder insists he prepared himself. Clip includes some shilling by principles; taste that insincerity! New footage does little to allay fears that the whole film has been shot in slow motion - however, I do see the thinking behind it; it stalls the image, albeit in a mechanical fashion, much like a reader taking time over a particularly astonishing image. Rodriguez and Miller's Sin City mash-up coulda' done with some of this time dilation, instead they amped up the narrative into a breathless sprint. That said though, Miller's manga infused image avalanche plays better to that particular brand of stylisation; Gibbon's maths panel begs for a more restrained, stylistically anaemic patter. Watchmen is more '92 Eastwood deconstruction than 60s Spaghetti belter. Ramble. Ramble. Displeasure must be strongly noted at Rorschach's newfound Sammy Davies Junior wall-run powers. Dear, oh dear. It's pretty central to Watchmen's thesis that Dr Manhattan is the only full blown superpower - the rest are all various creeds of degenerate playing dress-up. Word 'round the campfire is a massive chunk of the ending has been jettisoned too - no Harryhausen fans in Snyder's house? The knock on effect of which rather muddies some celestial noodling on man's relation to a God. Moaning and whining aside, I'm sure Watchmen will make for a much better film than than the ideologically compromised V For Vendetta movie or the dunderhead League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation. Feint praise indeed. That was meant to sound positive! I'm a dreary nerd blogger. Quick! Think of something nice. Erm. I really liked Manhattan disassembling the tank! That was wicked.

The Possibility Of Watchmen: The Movie Being Excellent Slips A Little Further Away.

Ouch.

Just highlight the link. It tells you everything you need to know.

Watch Alan Moore On The Telly.

Moore. Moore. Moore.

Here's a few Moore interview scraps from youtube. It's your Sunday evening gift.

First, Mr Moore being interviewed by Skins extras for what I can only assume is a college project. What a nice man.

Unlikely inspiration!

Moore-Man fails to impress! Simpsons also discussed!

Lastly, we have some interviews originally broadcast as part of BBC4's Comics Britannia series, albeit in truncated doses. Here they are in full: Moore offers his thoughts on four of his most famous series'. Can I just say, what a class act too - praise for his collaborators is never far from his lips.

V For Vendetta

Watchmen

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Lost Girls

Isn't Mr. Moore an erudite speaker and commentator? Lock him up in a room and ask him about everything.

Alan Moore Watches Telly.

And has rather excellent taste too.

Plus! Details on Century, the third volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; and thoughts on Zack Snyder's suitability for Watchmen.

Watch Watchmen

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.