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After drawing $155.34 million in its opening weekend, there’s a good chance you saw The Dark Knight this weekend. It was a great film, no doubt, but for some of us the fun started a few minutes early, with the premier of the first trailer for the long-awaited Watchmen.
Despite one of the characters’ resemblance to Batman, there’s a pretty good chance that most of the audience had no idea who these characters were or what was going on. They saw an office guy get disintegrated, a femme fatale in black-and-yellow vinyl crash through a flaming rooftop and a giant, glowing, blue, naked man, all set to a Smashing Pumpkins song.
For some of us, though, it was the first hint to the answer to a question we’ve had for over two decades: can a Watchmen film be good? As the trailer mentioned, the graphic novel from which it is adapted remains one of the most celebrated ever, even landing on Time’s “100 Greatest English Language Novels from 1923 to the Present” in 2005.
Along with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, this graphic novel introduced a psychological and thematic complexity that proved comic books could indeed be art. When it debuted as a series in 1986, most superheroes fell into two categories: square-jawed do-gooders like Superman and the more neurotic yet inherently noble heroes such as Spiderman.
The costumed adventurers of Watchmen are something else altogether. Their motivations and relationship to society are made of much more challenging stuff. The world it presents is set in an alternate 1985 where vigilantes have been outlawed in the wake of police strikes and public riots, where the only thing standing in the way of nuclear war is the world’s only superhuman, nominally an agent of the American government and where a single murder unravels a conspiracy that will bring everything to a head. It was heady stuff, the kind that has inspired a wealth of scholarship.
It was also considered by many to be unfilmable. Even the most optimistic of adapters feared it was too complex in theme and too intricate in detail to fit into a few hours of screen time. Having helmed last year’s successful 300, itself a faithful adaptation of a graphic novel,
director Zack Snyder has quite a challenge on his hands.
Yet for this fan, at least, the trailer that was released on Friday is an indication that Snyder may yet quiet the nay-sayers. Every scene and sequence evoked panels from the book, some so much so that I could almost picture the text captions over them. That it preceded such a brilliant superhero film as The Dark Knight, in many ways one of its spiritual descendents, made it even richer.
The film isn’t due to open until March 6 of next year, but it’s got one heck of a head start.
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