Watchmen movie is looking good!

We check out 20 minutes of footage, and chat with director Zack Snyder.

“Here’s the thing about Watchmen. It’s a story where Superman doesn’t like humanity, Batman can’t get it up, and the badguy just wants to bring about world peace.”

That’s what Zack Snyder, the director of Dawn of the Dead, 300 and now Watchmen, says of the characters in his latest effort to take a classic tale and present a new filmic vision to a modern audience. Of course, he’s not talking about the actual Bats and Supes, but rather, the characters - inspired by many popular and iconic heroes - Alan Moore used to tell tales that were firmly rooted in the iconic comic book tropes he built his Watchmen on.

Snyder was in Sydney yesterday to show journalists, the comic community and a couple of lucky Atomicans 20 minute worth of more or less completed footage from Watchmen. There was some placeholder music and effects (such as the awesome use of music from Koyaanisqatsi for the Dr Manhattan sequence!), but that was in the minority. He spoke briefly to introduce each scene, and then spent some time answering audience questions. But first things first...

We saw three distinct and complete scenes, and they did a good job of not only introducing the themes of the film, but also showcasing the painstaking level of detail that Snyder and his cast and crew has gone to to bring this supposedly impossible-to-film story to life.

The first sequence was the opening ten minutes of the film, which introduces both the central plot of Watchmen – that someone is methodically killing and sidelining now retired superheros – but also the alternate history of this superhero-populated Earth. After we see a murderous fight between ex-hero The Comedian and a black-clad assassin, the credits roll, and we’re treated to a history in montage of the 20th century, but not the one we’re familiar with.

We see the Minutemen, a famous team of supers – or masks as they’re called – and the impact they’ve had on the great events of the 20th century, and then their downfall and eventual outlawing. We see their triumphs and their sordid failures, and that the stamp they have left on world politics is a bleak one.

To say that Snyder has been obsessive in his attention to detail is damn with faint praise. From the kitschy costumes of the pre-war Masks, to the adoring fans of hero Ozymandias (which include The Village People and David Bowie) as he enters Studio 54, it’s a world that’s both easily recognisable and still vastly different. As Moore intended in his original work, this is what the world would really be like if it were inhabited by masked vigilantes.