Attached to the movie, however, is the first trailer for Watchmen, the film adaptation of the graphic novel due next March. Here's a link:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/watchmen/high.html
If you haven't heard of Watchmen, do yourself a favor and shell out $20 for a copy (you'll get your money's worth - it's 10 times longer than most graphic novels). It won the Hugo Award, and it was named one of Time Magazine's top 100 novels since 1923.
Written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen takes place in an alternate 1985 where superheroes exist, Richard Nixon is still president and tensions between the United States and Soviet Union are escalating by the minute. Superheroes have been outlawed unless they work for the government, and when one is murdered, the vigilante Rorschach's investigation sets the story in motion. Believe me, they invented the term "tip of the iceberg" for a synopsis like that.
I've had my reservations about this project since day one. Forgetting the fact that Watchmen is a wholly unadaptable graphic novel in the first place, the director is Zack Snyder, the same guy who made 300 all machismo and no grace. Despite the fact he's a fan of the book, and despite rumors of him using the novel as a "storyboard" and traveling around with a copy to "annotate its pages", I seriously doubt he can do more than replicate its look and orchestrate its ultraviolence. The prevailing ideology, the question of who or what governs these heroes - i.e. "who watches the Watchmen?" - is something that belongs in the hands of a director like David Fincher, not Snyder.
The cast is largely unknowns, but they aren't particularly talented unknowns, and a running time shorter than The Dark Knight suggests this is going to be a monumental failure.
The new trailer has done nothing to assuage those fears. Sure, it looks great. Sure, it sounds great. Sure, the rabid fan in me is thrilled to see it on screen. But the surface is all Snyder seems to offer. (And the song playing over it is "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" by Smashing Pumpkins, which was on the soundtrack of Batman & Robin. Harbinger?)
Time to prove me wrong, Mr. Snyder. And legions of fans, too.
Never surrender, even in the face of a Watchmen movie
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