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I am SOOOOOO excited to see this movie. (In IMAX!)

I read the graphic novel about a year ago and fell in love, completely in love, with the genius of it. Set in 1980’s New York City Watchmen explores what the world would be like if super heroes really existed. And not just that, but if they existed during the Vietnam War, in the wake of the mess Nixon left and in the midst of America’s social and cultural landscape. It’s the kind of graphic novel that is so good that even people that hate comics can recognize the literary mastery of the writer. 

Watchmen’s Sexy Trailer

Making Watchmen into a film is Zach Snyder, director of that other graphic-novel-turned-movie 300. I thought Zach Snyder was kind of a sell-out putz for doing two comic book movies in a row and for turning Watchmen into a film. Watchmen does things that only graphic novels can do, so it seems like turning it into a movie will bastardize the original content. I kind of agree with Alan Moore, Watchmen’s writer, who hates Hollywood’s insistence of taking and diluting good work. He didn’t want Watchmen or V for Vendetta (which he also wrote) remade. But Watchmen especially because, ”With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there. You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you’re being dragged through it at 24 frames per second.”

 Because I saw the V for Vendetta movie before I read the graphic novel, I didn’t mind the adaptation. I thought the movie was good as a movie and the comic great as a comic. Watchmen on the other hand, made me really nervous because it is such a prolific work. I always defend adaptations because I think they are allowed to change what they want but Watchmen is something that you want to be faithful. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it being remade.

BUT after watching the trailer (it aired before The Dark Knight) I am oh-so-happy with Zach Snyder.

Snyder didn’t cast really famous actors because he didn’t want to take away from the film, he kept the image and looks of the characters, he kept their personalities (even the ones that studio execs would shy away from), he had the most fitting music ever playing over the trailer, he pretty much made me more excited about Watchmen then about The Dark Knight (well, the second time I saw it). Look forward to seeing Patrick Wilson (Nite Owll II), Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach), Matthew Goode (Ozymandias), Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre II), and  Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian) in Watchmen being released in March 2009.

Is anyone else on this blog excited about this movie? *crickets*