Watchmaker

With the weekend edging towards a close I’ve been idling my time away watching the trailer for Watchmen around preparing a cheese and ham toastie. And God damn! That turned out to be a brilliant sandwich.


As for the trailer; not so good really. Toward the end of last year, when I finally caught up with Sin City, I thought the failure of Robert Rodriguez’s film was that it was simply too darn reverential to Frank Miller’s original comic series. Transferring it, rather than translating it to the screen, Rodriguez was so utterly slavish to the source material that it was just monotone and, frankly, dull as fuck.

Certainly director Zack Snyder appears to have followed the same route for Watchmen and gone overboard when it comes to attention to detail, replicating Dave Gibbons’ beautifully intricate comic book panels with nerdish devotion. Whether he’s managed to corral the intricacies of Alan Moore’s multi-layered narrative into a two-and-a-half-hour running time remains to be seen.


After all, this first trailer is primarily aimed at everyone converging on San Diego next weekend, buying up every box of Kleenex they can get along the way for the repeated viewings. But it does make you understand why Moore wants nothing to do with the adaptations of his work. V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen worked beautifully on the page but on screen, disappointingly, fall flat, looking like their scripts had been ham-fistedly gouged out of the ripe source material.

If anything, they proved that comic book adaptations work better from broad source material, like the recent Iron Man, rather than specific, contained stories. Even Guillermo del Toro’s first Hellboy movie expanded on Mike Mignola’s original Seed of Destruction story with elements from The Right Hand of Doom and Box of Evil as well as developing the characters, rather than stick rigidly to what was on the page.

Still, the most intriguing part of this initial Watchmen trailer is just how fucking awful the CGI work is. I don’t know if Snyder went the same green-screen route at his previous film, 300, based on Frank Miller’s take on the battle of Thermopylae, but playing with a budget of $100 million, the effects work should be better than what’s on display. The brief snippets with The Comedian and Dr Manhattan in Vietnam look shockingly bad.


Any excuse that it’s probably work in progress is utter bullshit. Who in their right mind would put unfinished work in a trailer? Back on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, once the material for the trailers were decided on, the scenes were fast tracked through the departments so they could be cut in and put into cinemas. They weren’t just slapped together with whatever was on offer and shipped out by the studio.

Still, it might all come together. Although I’m not sure I really care all that much. Instead I think I’ll go back to Rocketeer, which took the late Dave Stevens’ ravishingly illustrated comic book serial and made something perfect. “That son of a bitch will fly!”