So here’s the new Watchmen trailer. Watch it. I’ll wait.
Finished? OK.
I’ve got a baaaaaaaaaaad feeling about this. I’ve watched the trailer twice now and while I’m a little less troubled by Rorschach sounding like Harvey Fierstein-with-Laryngitis voice, the wooden delivery of the handful of lines in the trailer has me crapping my pants in fanboy terror. Ugh.
Also this:
has me convinced that the (SPOILERISH WARNING) that the ending has, in fact, been changed.
I want my squid monster, dammit!
Must. Contain. Nerd. Rage.
I agree with the final comment about needing a squid, but I am eternally optimistic about my nerdish desires becoming movies. The first trailer kicked a lot of ass, but this one did not. I’m just hoping it’s just a bad trailer, and not a bad movie.
The first trailer was much better. It left more to the imagination, so at the end you were like, “this is going to be awesome!”
I’m not a fanboy, but, this trailer definitely made me nervous, since I’m going to watch the movie for sure, and I am rooting for it not to suck.
…and by the way, doesn’t Rorschach sound a lot like Bale’s Batman?
squid monster was the weakest part of the book. fact.
Don’t go see it. Duh. God, don’t you idiots ever learn? They’re going to keep farming this shit out, this shit you hate, and it’s never going to stop because no matter how much you know it’s going to suck, you still go see it.
At least buy tix for something else.
the squid monster was weak, yes. How does a nuke make any more sense? A nuke wouldn’t unite the world, it’d set off world war three.
I don’t know anything about comics, but I could probably stare at the woman with the bangs and the yellow suit for 90 minutes in a dark theater.
agreed w/ @5. + “the wooden delivery of the handful of lines in the trailer has me crapping my pants in fanboy terror. Ugh.” This comment applies to 90% of the super hero movies.
I don’t think this necessarily precludes inclusion of ole’ squiddy, but rather this could simply be the visual representation of the means by which squiddy appears, ala the “time bubble” from “The Terminator” out of which Schwartzenecker appears.
And yeah, Rorschach does sound a bit too much like, “The Goddamned Batman”, while The Owl moves way too much like him to boot. I mean, what happened to the slightly overweight ex-costumed vigilante The Owl is supposed to be?
I disagree entirely. That’s the trailer I saw at Imax earlier this year.
It. Fuckin’. Rawked.
For escapist entertainment, that is. The lushness detail in every scene, the faithfulness to the book, everything. Getting Glass for the score was also a coup.
You’re seeing it on the tiny innarweb screen… wait til you see it big…
Hopefully it’s just their way of making the sudden appearance of the monster more dramatic. It appears from within a catastrophic explosion or shock wave of some sort…
That trailer was amazing. Way better than the first. The first one in no way made me excited for the movie….this one did.
The ending was changed dramtically. It was getting much better reveiws among focus groups than squimdo takes manhattan did.
I never liked Snyder, I thought 300 was very weak, but I’m hopeful for the Watchmen movie. The trailer doesn’t really excite me, and I’m worried about the ending change, but I read an interview with him a while back where he said that he was very concerned about the ending and didn’t want to change the meaning of it.
That’s actually exactly how Rorschach’s squiggly little words always sounded in my head.
@13, is that true? It’s been confirmed almost since the movie was announced that the ending was different, but I heard that reactions from those who saw the non-squid finale was largely negative. (Now that I think of it, though, it could have been a screening for fanboys in particular that garnered the negative reactions.)
There’s no squid. The explosion in the trailer is triggered by Ozymandius in New York to fake Dr. Manhattan having gone destructively crazy. You can also see the close-to-the-end of the movie Nite Owl shrieking as the glowy bits of the just-vaporized Rorsharch fall to the snow around him in the trailer.
Hated, loathed, despised “300” in both its graphic novel and film versions. But I’ve given away about a dozen copies of the “Watchmen” graphic novel to friends. This trailer doesn’t have me nervous, it has me fucking stoked.
And I have to say, Rorschach sounds about 99% similar to the voice I imagined in my head reading the novel. Not only that, who cares if the ending setpiece gets altered from the source material? Sometimes what works on the page doesn’t work on the screen. Look at “The Prestige” for an example of how an ending (indeed, entire plot points) can be tweaked and altered for a more effective cinematic approach. That doesn’t make either version objectively “worse” or “better,” it makes them “different.” It’s your fearful reaction to the unknown that leads to these value judgments BEFORE YOU’VE ACTUALLY SEEN THE THING.
Good call, Comte. I hope it is just a dramatic way to introduce Squiddy.
As far as Rorschach’s voice, I’d always imagined him sounding a bit more like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. Deep, gravelly and a little monotone. Less like Harvey Fierstein.
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but I’m pretty sure they never actually referred to themselves as The Watchmen. Yet in the trailer it seems like they mention it at least a couple of times. Minor point I guess.
The voiceover is a bit cheesy, and it’s a little lame that they actually refer to them as the Watchmen (like “the Fantastic Four”), but it looks amazing. A few changes are to be expected, of course. To be honest, as much as I love it, the original did have some real weak points, not too mention some enjoyably cheesy writing.
I have it on good authority that the revised ending for the film works actually better than the squid. So, I am hopeful.
This looks fucking terrible. And it’s from the director of 300, which doesn’t exactly reassure me.
@ 21, et al. Yes, yes, fanboy here… But I bet you feel all superior talking about how much the ending sucked and how the writing was “weak” or “cheesy.” Different genres do not mean that they’re inferior. The work was critically acclaimed. Among other praise, it won the Hugo award and Time Magazine included it in their 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century.
Yeah, they improved the ending. Last line of the movie:
SILK SPECTRE: Shut up and kiss me, Rorshach.
I can live with or without the big squid: that part of the book was directly (and acknowledgedly) lifted from the old “The Outer Limits” show, and really was a pretty obvious deus-ex-machina. It can be replaced pretty easily, I think.
The line delivery worries me more, but what really makes me nervous is that Laurie Juspeczyk (the Silk Spectre — the woman in the yellow outfit to those of you who haven’t read the book) is being played by a 22-year-old, and they don’t seem to be making any attempt to even make her look older. The whole point of her character is that she’s hitting the same age as when the (unaging) Dr. Manhattan dumped his first wife for her, and she’s realizing that her husband isn’t ever going to change. If Snyder didn’t get that, then it’s likely that he looked at Watchmen and just saw a bunch of cool guys in cool outfits doing cool stuff and blowing things up — and this will be an irritatingly stupid movie.
The only thing that really bugs me about the trailer is that they call them “Watchmen.” Ugh. I just reread the graphic novel this week, and I am loving how many of the shots in the trailer are seemingly directly from the book.
And yes, hearing “Watchmen” used as a line of dialog in the movie grates. The comic spent a good bit of time establishing that these people were incapable of ever working together, and that was the genesis of the whole series of events.
I couldn’t get through 300. Watched about a fourth of it, and couldn’t take anymore of the awful crap. I don’t have high hopes for this movie.
1) The squid monster kinda sucked.
2) There is a new ending, they’ve confirmed this. And it’s not a nuke.
3) The first time I saw the new trailer I watched the Flash version. That was a mistake. Watch the Quicktime HD version here:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808406490…
The audio compression in the Flash version is fucking terrible. You lose some context. Watch the Quicktime version and you’ll be happier.
4) This movie will rock.
We protest that no same-sex squids were cast for this movie! Seriously, how come?
I am a huge fan of the book and, while I love the squid as an homage to 50’s pulp sci-fi and it definitely works on paper, it’s way too cheesy, and the explanation of it is waaaaay too convoluted to work on screen. From what I’ve heard of the ending of the movie, there is still a “monster” created for the world to unite against (which is the whole point), it’s just not the same monster in the book, and, frankly, it works much better and is more realistic, which I never thought I’d hear myself saying.
Now, I HATED 300, do not get me wrong, but a big part of the problem with that movie is that THE SOURCE MATERIAL SUCKED IN THE FIRST PLACE. 300 was the beginning of Frank Miller’s long ride down the road to crazy crypto-right-winger town. Let’s face it, he is basically Sobchak from The Big Lebowski at this point; he’s charming, in his way, but you wouldn’t want to spend an extended period of time with the guy.
ANYway, point being, I don’t fault Snyder for that sucking. Plus, I read a very interesting interview with him where someone asked about the uproar about changing the ending and I thought he had a really good answer which was something along the lines of, “Everybody is asking ‘Did they keep the squid” – what they should be asking is ‘Did they keep the Comedian shooting the pregnant mother of his child?” or ‘Did they keep the ‘God exists and he’s an American’ line?” These things are far more important to this maintaining the spirit of the book than the exact mechanism by which we get to the same moral conclusion.”
That, probably more than anything, gives me a lot of hope for this movie.
I was barley able to breathe during both of the trailers. I CANNOT WAIT for this movie.