The Watchmen was an absolutely superb 12-part comic book series that ran from 1986 to 1987, and I had no idea they were making it into a movie until I was in the movie theatres watching The Dark Knight and the trailer came on. The trailer gave me shivers – the cinematography is breathtaking, and the music they picked (Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins) sent shivers up my spine. No surprises there: it’s from the director of 300. The comic book series was a wild, sprawling tale that had great depth, so I’m really interested to see if they can condense it into a two-hour movie and have it still make sense.
There’s not much up at the official movie site, but they do offer HD downloads of the trailer. I downloaded the 1080p WMV trailer, put it on my Windows Home Server, and played it back on my Xbox 360 attached to my TV. One word: wow. It looked fantastic! There’s also a 720p trailer if your computer chokes on the 1080p.
I saw the trailer ahead of Dark Knight as well and thought it looked amazing. I haven’t read the graphic novels, but am still really looking forward to it. There’s bad news on the movie front though – I don’t know if you heard, but Fox is taking WB to court to prevent the release of the movie saying they had the rights. I find it interesting that Fox apparently didn’t realize this until Warner Bros. finished shooting the movie at a cost of $100M.
You can read more about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/movies/30watc.htm
Based on that story, man, what a bunch of idiots at Fox – I really hope this gets sorted out and the movie isn’t delayed. Shakespeare had it right: we need to kill all the lawyers.