With the majority of my Friday at Comic Con over I have seen the new Watchmen footage and interviewed Watchmen director Zack Snyder, “Watchmen” artist/co-creator Dave Gibbons, and cast members including Jackie Earl Haley, James Dean Morgan, Carla Gugino, Malin Ackerman, Matthew Goode, Patrick Wilson and Billy Crudup. Basically, I talked with all of them and I will have those interviews for you over the next couple of days.
As for the footage, I am sorry to say it was rather underwhelming after seeing the trailer. The new footage included several new scenes many of you will recognize from the graphic novel and extensions of scenes from the trailer including a better idea of how R-rated it is as we see Dr. Manhattan reeking havoc in Vietnam as the Vietnamese don’t just go poof, the go BOOM in an explosion of blood and slices of skin. That was pretty cool. We also saw Dolar Bill with his cape caught in the revolving door, a smile from The Comedian to Silk Spectre and I have some great news involving the scene in which The Comedian gets his scar from Jeffrey Dean Morgan that fans of the graphic novel are going to LOVE!
However, it was just a bunch of action and as you will soon read in my interview with Snyder, he couldn’t care less if we see all the action, after all, “Watchmen” is not about the action, it’s about the story
David gave a recap of his impression of the footage and a much more detailed description here on our Comic Con blog. He was rather underwhelmed as well, but that isn’t to say we didn’t like it, we just can’t wait to get a better idea of how the actual narrative will be presented. Something to look forward to I guess.
While I was interviewing the Watchmen folk David was busy covering the Universal Pictures presentation for The Wolfman, which featured the first look at footage from the picture.
David has already posted his recap of that right here, but here is a snippet:
As for the footage, well it looks damn atmospheric, placing the gothic 19th century setting front and center. Plenty of shadow-drenched shots and silhouettes and a very muted color palette. A raspy narrator–who turns out to be some old coot in the film–speaks of a savage event 25 years in the past his father witnessed. This is where we get the hard-R image of a halved corpse with his intestines splattered out on the ground.
Personally I am a huge fan of the original Wolf Man from 1941 and am HIGHLY jealous I didn’t get to see the goods, but I guess that makes up for me seeing the footage from Wolverine. Gotta bite the bullet sometimes. Read David’s complete piece from the Wolfman panel right here.
As for the rest of the day I will be checking out Kevin Smith’s panel and hope to bring you a lot of good news from that, and I still have a write up for Max Payne to do from yesterday as well as my impressions of the teenage girl onslaught on Thursday for Summit’s Twilight presentation. Stay tuned.
