Zack Snyder, director of the upcoming Watchmen movie, screened about 30 minutes of heretofore unseen footage from the epic superhero saga to groups of reporters on Oct. 1 at Warner studios in West Hollywood, Calif., and also announced that the film will have a running time of two hours and 43 minutes.
Snyder screened three clips. The first showed the attack on Edward Blake, aka The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), followed by the title sequence that sets up the Watchmen universe. The second clip is the transformation of physicist Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) into the superhuman blue Dr. Manhattan. The final clip was the assault by Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) and Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) on the prison to free Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).
When asked if the stars' contracts have a sequel clause, Snyder winced. "I don't know, I have to be honest," he told an audience. "That would be interesting but, there can't be a sequel. There can't be a prequel. Not with me involved, anyway. I have no idea if they could find someone to do it, but it wouldn't be me. That's crazy talk."
Perhaps the most impressive footage of the day was the film's title sequence, a montage of slow-motion scenes that took viewers from the 1930s and the origin of the alternate-universe United States in which costumed adventurers actually exist, to 1977, when a law is passed outlawing superheroes. The sequence, which took its inspiration from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' original graphic novel, is nevertheless mostly Snyder's creation and mines pop-culture images, newsreels, movies and TV to create its alternate universe, played out to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"
In quick succession, the audience sees some of the original superheroes--the original Nite Owl, Carla Gugino's Silk Spectre in her yellow skirted costume, the Comedian in an early costume--and the fateful 1940 meeting of the Minutemen. Then a World War II bomber with "Miss Jupiter" on its nose, dropping a nuclear weapon on Japan; Dr. Manhattan shaking hands with John F. Kennedy on the White House lawn; a recreation of the Zapruder film assassination of Kennedy, which pans to the Comedian cradling a rifle on the grassy knoll; Andy Warhol with a painting of Nite Owl II; the Apollo II moon landing, with Dr. Manhattan holding a camera; Ozymandias on the red carpet outside Studio 54; a protest in the 1970s against the costumed adventurers in which someone spray paints "Who Watches the Watchmen?"
Malin Akerman (left) is Silk Spectre II, and Patrick Wilson is Nite Owl II in Watchmen, Zack Snyder's upcoming adaptation of the seminal graphic novel.
Preceding the title sequence, the film opens in the film's 1985 present in a scene in which a masked attacker enters Edward Blake's apartment in New York as he's watching The McLaughlin Group, who argue about the nuclear crisis brewing between the United States and Soviet Union. Blake switches the TV to an ad for Veidt Enterprises' "Nostalgia" perfume when his door is kicked in: "Just a matter of time, I suppose," Blake says. As the music of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" plays, the assailant brutally attacks Blake, who nevertheless fights back, though he's slower, heavier and dressed in a bathrobe. The fight is intense and violent: At one point, the assailant smashes Blake's head through a granite kitchen counter, shattering it. At another, the assailaint heaves Blake over his head like a sack of grain and throws him across the room. At the end, as the assailant stands a bleeding Blake on his feet, Blake laughs: "It's all a joke." Blood drips from his face onto his ever-present smiley-face button, and the assailant heaves him through the plate glass window and into space. The camera follows Blake out the window, lingers on the now-free smiley-face button and watches as Blake plummets to his death on the sidewalk below.
Billy Crudup is Jon Osterman, whose accident in a nuclear lab turns him into the superhuman Dr. Manhattan.
The second clip was dedicated to Osterman/Dr. Manhattan and tracked Moore/Gibbons' novel closely. We begin with Dr. Manhattan's appearance on Mars, then jump around with him in time: to the 1950s, with his first date with Janey Slater (Laura Mennell); the accident in the nuclear lab's intrinsic field chamber that deconstructs Osterman into atoms; Jon as a child, repairing a watch; Osterman's first meeting with Janey in a bar; Osterman's first appearance as Dr. Manhattan, rising godlike in the lab's lunchroom. In a bar, Dr. Manhattan raises his hand to armed gangsters, who simply explode into gobbets of blood, flesh and bone. At the end, Dr. Manhattan on Mars intones, "I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being constantly in the tangle of their lives." He floats above the Martian surface in a lotus position as his clockwork crystal palace erupts from the Martian plain.
The final clip begins with a post-coital Laurie Juspeczyk (Akerman) and Dan Dreiberg (Wilson) in the cruising Owl Ship. They decide to break Rorschach out of prison. As the Owl Ship flies in, Juspeczyk as Silk Spectre II drops out of the hovering craft and neatly rolls onto the prison's roof. Dreiberg's Nite Owl jumps out, arms oustretched, gliding down on his cape.
The prison is in riot; inmates trying to break into the guard's station. Silk Spectre and Nite Owl enter the cell block. As inmates attack, the heroes easily parry their blows, striking, kicking and dispatching them all with roundhouse kicks and brutal punches. The duo make a plausibly badass pair of superheroes. At the end, they find Rorschach, in full costume, as he takes a moment to deal with a small bothersome inmate in the men's room before leaving.
