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Watching the Watchmen

July 26th, 2008

Comic book fans have been full of talk about the Watchmen movie for quite a while. Time.com just put out an article about the Watchmen preview at the Comic-Con in San Diego, going on right now.

This sort of coverage represents a validation, approval and acceptance of comics that was unimaginable to me as a kid. The catch is, today’s comic books hold no interest for me, in part because I felt when the Watchmen series came out it was the final word on the super hero genre. Writer Alan Moore had succeeded in extracting everything there was to be said about costumed heroes.

The best place to see the Watchmen trailer is the official site, but I’ll post it here for convenience, if you want to avoid all of the Flash animation that’s typical of movie sites.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Overall, it looks very promising, but the Vietnam scenes have a fake appearance, and Dr. Manhattan isn’t quite as convincing as he should be. Rorschach’s voice is too similar to Christian Bale’s Batman. But all of this can be fixed in post-production. I’m also a bit concerned that if the big climax in the story isn’t handled just right, it will be unintentionally humorous. We’ll know in March.

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