Someone could have recorded it, against the wishes of the studio and Comic-Con, but I doubt that you'll find anything. I am posting my description from the Comic-Con thread: The greatest thing [on Friday] was the new, expanded Watchmen trailer. I hope it will be offficially released online soon. There was more footage of Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) this time. We also got a glimpse of the Minutemen in 1940, gathering for their group photo. This is a scene that, as fans of the book know, precedes the Comedian's (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) attempted rape of Sally Jupiter, a.k.a. Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino). The trailer gives us the Comedian leering at Sally but not the dramatic incident that follows. Other bits in the trailer include Nite Owl's airship in the Antarctic and Doctor Manhattan destroying mobsters and Vietnamese. Also in Viet Nam, the Comedian is slashed in the face by a woman (like all the other scenes, it is right out of the book). We see a white-haired President Richard Nixon. We see the ink spots changing on Rorschach's mask. And Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) begins removing her costume. Mercy! Director Zack Snyder, artist Dave Gibbons and the entire principal cast appeared at the panel. Snyder says that his film will adapt some of the sidebar material from the book ("Dr. Manhattan: Super-Powers and the Superpowers," for example). Gibbons has been thrilled to be involved with the production, and he wishes that Alan Moore did not feel so negative about the film. Wilson laughed about getting fat for the role. Gugino said she found it very satisfying to play Sally, an adventurer and exhibitionist in her youth and, years later, an introspective old woman who misses the spotlight.
Practically everything in the trailers can be identified as a scene from the book. A photo of the Minutemen in Watchmen has already been released: http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Awesome-Picture-of-Watchmen-s-Minutemen-Online-8958.html
I watched the trailer, and as a total outsider who knows nothing and has no idea what he's looking at, these are my thoughts: -The opening with the radiation chamber guy is pretty sweet. -Then it changed into a music video for a while with a bunch of stuff that looked, erm, interesting. -The glowy blue guy looked pretty sweet. Probably the only element that'll really stick in the heads of non-fans. -And the only other parts that stuck out to me was all the use of blowtorches, and the babe, and... -IT'S BATMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! -Whoops, nevermind. -The machinery thing at the end was pretty neat, but I have no idea what it's supposed to be. -That told me nothing about the plot, really, but that's ok since this is a teaser. But it is a odd mix of camp and LE DRAMA.
^FYI, the "radiation chamber guy" becomes the "glowy blue guy"...not really much of a spoiler, that's his origin. He's disassembled particle by particle, and somehow manages to put himself back together. I know that, but... DANG! How the hell are they squeezing all of this into one movie? In any adaptation from book to film, I expect a good amount of story condensation, plenty of omitted details.
I know... it's wrong. But lots of Dark Knight stuff turned up on line last year after Comic-Con. I haven't found anything yet. Just checking.
Snyder is feeling the pressure to keep the theatrical release down to two and 1/2 hours. He mentioned arguing with the studio about various cuts. It's going to be very difficult to keep it to a length that pleases everyone. But at Comic-Con he also outlined a plan for an expanded version for DVD, one that weaves all sorts of extra material and footage (including the "Black Freighter" story) into the main narrative. That should be something to look forward to.
I'd have thought about splitting it into two movies...if they think they need to do it for The Hobbit, why not this? You know that if it's a success, the bloody studio is going to insist on a sequel anyway...! I suppose that begs the purely hypothetical question, is there enough story meat in the first halfish of the miniseries to make a movie that generates interest for a sequel? At what point would you cut the story in two? I'll have to think about it myself. (I'd ask that any discussion be mindful of spoilers for the unitiated.)
The thing about splitting Watchmen into two films like The Hobbit is, they know The Hobbit is going to make bank, whereas they don't know if Watchmen will.
The other thing about splitting The Hobbit into two is that only the first one is the actual book itself. The other one's covering the time between the books.
Right, that too. The Hobbit is a story that can easily be told in one movie (it probably won't even need to be three hours long, like FOTR and TTT were).
They used the wrong reference picture from the Comic. The picture that the movie version is based upon is actually hanging on the wall in Mason's house. The one from the comic is used in Mason's "Under The Hood."
Yeah, I'm re-reading the book now, after almost 20 years! So much background detail at the beginning that pays off down the road... Note that the newsstand in Chapter 3 is sitting in front of the "Institute for Extraspatial Studies", which doesn't get mentioned in the narrative until Chapter 7, likewise the 'Missing Writer' notice on the side of the newsstand. This is just the most realistically-drawn comic art I've seen, at least in terms of minutae and continuity.
As I understand it, he thinks that what he wrote is appropriate for the comics medium but was never designed to be adapted to anything else. If it were meant to be a movie, he would have written it that way in the first place. It's a valid artistic opinion. Certainly every piece of art has its ideal medium and not all adaptations are possible or recommended. As someone more clever than me once said, you can't make a wood carving of a Jackson Pollock painting. Heck, didn't Watchmen practically invent the term? Oh, I'm certain that was the source material. If there's something that 300 and Sin City have in common it's that Frank Miller is out of his f---ing mind! His stories are always such raging testosterone-fests that I'm convinced he's compensating for something. The best thing I can say about 300 is that it's not quite as misogynistic as Sin City. I've only read about 1/4 of my copy of the Watchmen graphic novel. I like it. I plan on getting back to it and finishing it before the movie comes out. The movie trailer looks absolutely amazing. One little touch that surprised me was how much the actor playing the Comedian looks like his comic book counterpart.
I heard that, too, but I have doubts that the studio will let him. He's also prepared to a director's cut already, putting in additional material like the Black Freighter.
Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how he's gonna cut this thing down under 2.5. Maybe he should just cut his shoehorned subplot on alternative fuels. What that hell was he thinking? He doesn't think the material is "gripping" enough so he fucking invents some?
There is a two or three panel sequence about alternative fuels in the comic, though. It's in the fourth chapter, where Dr. Manhattan's history is told. And, in flashback, one of the Detroit automakers is talking to Dr. Manhattan about all the great things that cars can do, and Dr. Manhattan says, "Yes, enjoy your retirement." He's seen the future, and the future is lithium battery-powered cars. Cars that happen because of Dr. Manhattan. He's not inventing anything. That's part of the world of Watchmen. The world of 1985 is powered on alternative fuels.
You know, I'm all in favor of electrically-driven cars as opposed to combustion-driven cars. I've worked a little bit on that sort of thing. (And add into the mix "fuel-cell" based cars, which use a chemical reaction not to create mechanical motion inside the engine but rather an electrical current which can power electrical devices... sort of a "half-way" point.) Unfortunately, today, I keep hearing technological illiterates talking about "batteries" as though they CREATE POWER. Which is entirely untrue. First thing... "battery" isn't a description of a power storage device. It's a description of a CLUSTER of power storage devices. In other words, your typical "AAA" isn't a BATTERY, it's a CELL. The only actual "battery" you'd normally use is the 9-volt, which is basically a box containing 6 1.5v cells in series. It's a battery because it contains multiple cells. Your car has a battery... because it contains multiple cells. Most of those little cylindrical things we buy are NOT "batteries" at all. I mention this mainly to ensure that we use the right words for the right purposes. It's true that you can manufacture a one-time-use cell which has an inherent electrochemical potential without being "charged." Your typical Duracell (non-rechargeable) cell is that way. Of course, once that's discharged, it's useless and can only be discarded... not something useful for the purposes of powering an automobile, don't you agree? The lithium ion based cells that are most commonly used in "electric vehicles" today are, however, rechargeable. The rechargeables you'll buy at Best Buy are normally nickel-metal-hydride, which has largely superseded nickel-cadmium rechargeables over the past decade. With a decent-size cluster (or "battery") of lithium-ion cells, you can get enough electochemical potential to drive an automobile in a reasonable fashion. It's true. But what people keep missing is that it takes power to CHARGE those batteries in the first place. SO... it gets generated in a power plant, sent over long lengths of wire, multiple junctions and interfaces, and is then transferred into the battery (as a chemical change), then needs to be discharged from that battery to drive the electromagnetic devices it powers. Each and every step of that process has losses... so while the device ITSELF may seem reasonably efficient, you need to track the efficiency of the power output from the original source of power, not simply from the battery itself, to make a reasonable comparison. When you look at things that way, electrical cars are no more efficient (in terms of total power required to provide equivalent propulsion) than are internal combustion drive cars. In fact, depending on how far you are away from the power generation facility and on the quality of the transmission lines, you can be a lot LESS efficient. What needs to be addressed here, then, is not "how good are the batteries in the cars" but rather "what is the ORIGINAL SOURCE OF POWER?" If we continue to generate power using coal-fired or oil-fired power plants, you'll ultimately end up with greater fuel consumption to move a car the same distance. It just gets consumed at a different location... in a plant rather than in your car. The argument that "wind power" or "wave power" or "solar power" can replace that form of power generation is spurious. I'm all for using those however and whenever we can (including the building of the offshore windfarm that Senator Kennedy nixed because it would have spoiled his view from his yacht... and no, I'm not kidding about that, it's true!). But the total power output from those types of sources can only provide a fraction of what we currently need, much less what we'll need for the future. CERTAINLY not enough to make electrically-driven cars a wide-scale practicality. So combustion-driven power plants driving battery-charge-driven cars are WORSE, environmentally and consumption-wise, than the equivalent (gasoline-powered cars). And "alternative sources" can't replace combustion-driven power sources. The general idea behind lithium-ion battery technology isn't anything new or revolutionary, though we've improved the processes used to make these recently. In other words, in this FICTIONAL WORLD, there's nothing Dr. Manhattan could have contributed to make the batteries a practicality. No... what he had to have given that other world would have to be an alternative power source. Something that creates no combustion products. Hmmm... we already have something like that. And most of the world (the US excluded) uses it extensively. I'm talking about nuclear fission. So, maybe what Dr. Manhattan provided was a way to optimize fission to be more easily controllable and to "clean" the waste in some fashion (perhaps even "cleaning it up" himself???) On the other hand, the "holy grail" of power generation, so far, would be controllable FUSION. Despite claims from time to time, so far nobody has ever created a controllable fusion reaction, much less a "cold fusion" reaction. The nice thing about fusion is that it generates a lot more power per unit of consumed fuel... that the fuel itself is plentiful (simply monatomic hydrogen ions, easily created). We simply lack the ability to control the reaction... the only way we can initiate it right now is through the detonation of a fusion bomb, and there's no way we know to prevent a chain-reaction. SO... what Dr. Manhattan would have given the "Watchmen" world would either be a way to use fission more cleanly, or a way to safely initiate and control fusion. Both of which seem perfectly reasonable for someone with his powers. I just wanted to point this out, because of the misconception that it was somehow the BATTERIES which made the electrical cars a reality (and which could, by extension, make them a practicality in OUR world!) That's simply not the case. Electrical cars in widespread use in any world... real or "realistic fictional"... require extremely widespread use of nuclear power to be practical. Which is exactly what a fictional "Dr. Manhattan" would lead towards... so it fits quite well in this situation, I think.