With the anticipation mounting to the release of the Watchmen movie in a few weeks readers might be interested to know that the current issue of SciFi Now features a free Watchmen preview DVD.
The disc includes several trailers for the movie, a gallery of stills, short production diaries, and an interview with director Zack Snyder including clips from the film. The production diaries are particularly interesting, showing the detail that's gone into adapting the urban environment from the graphic novel.
How well the public and fans will receive the Watchmen movie remains to be seen. I suspect some moviegoers won't appreciate a superhero film that a) doesn't feature characters they're familiar with and b) isn't a family friendly popcorn movie. My hope is that it'll spur enough interest to turn more people onto the comic so they can either enrich their appreciation of the movie or, if the film's a dud, see how much better the graphic novel is to the screen version.
Not to be too negative but one thing they seem to have gotten wrong already is the blood splatter design on the Smiley badge in the promos. Surely the angle and shape of the splatter was a visual symbolism for the hand of the doomsday clock, at ten seconds to midnight, not a blob on the edge as the movie poster has it? Okay I'm probably being incredibly pedantic but that Dave Gibbons design is iconic, and an important visual metaphor of the story.
Watchmen opens on March 6th. Official movie website HERE.
SciFi Now is available in all good newsagents. Visit their website HERE.
...and if you've never read the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons now's your chance. Copies are in bookshops everywhere!
You're not being pedantic over the blood spattering. A group of us were actually discussing this in Forbidden Planet in Coventry, on Saturday.
ReplyDeleteSure it's a nice looking blood splat! but it does lose that visual, which is a bit of a shame.
Still pretty psyched up about the movie, obviously, but as it gets closer my own pedant circuits appear to firing into action...
I am really looking forward to this one Lew! I never noticed the bloodsplatter/doomsdayclock similarity makes perfect sense now. I hope that the promotion of this film is sending off the correct message. When V for Vendetta was released it was promoted as a Matrix style fighting film instead of what it actually was. This caused quite a few petty reviews, shame really hopefully Watchmen can avoid this!
ReplyDelete