The Filtnib’s Progress

I saw the first trailer for this last year and wasn’t particularly excited. But at that point I knew nothing about Watchmen (I know, apologies to all comic-enthusiasts). I think I then filed it away in my brain alongside Night Watch and subsequently came to think of them as one and the same. Oops.

Thank goodness, then, that a friend of mine put me to rights yesterday, explaining that Watchmen was one of the best graphic novels of all time, and noting how annoying it was that the long awaited film adaptation had been held up in a post-production scrap between Fox and Warner Bros (full story here).

Turns out, that dispute has very recently been settled, and the film is now due out on March 6. The new trailer gives a far greater sense of narrative and character than the first, although I still wonder whether it really does justice to the film’s potential.

Partly that’s because trailers often focus on high-octane action in the hope of winning viewers through sheer visual violence; partly it’s because there’s been such a slew of superhero films in the last decade that it’s easy to feel jaded at the sight of yet another rubberized torso.

But it’s exactly this apparent superfluity of superheroes that the the novel and the film are interested in. Creator Alan Moore told one interviewer he wanted to explore “the idea of the superman manifest within society“, while in a brilliant literary analysis of the book, philosophy professor Iain Thomson called Watchmen a “masterful deconstruction of the hero”. All of which sounds pretty exciting.

Clearly this is not only a completely different film from Night Watch or Day Watch or whatever that other film with watch in the title was called, it could also be a pivotal film for the whole superhero genre.

Watchmen is in UK cinemas from March 6.

* Time magazine agrees: it was the only graphic novel in their list of the 100 greatest novels, and here’s why: “Told with ruthless psychological realism, in fugal, overlapping plotlines and gorgeous, cinematic panels rich with repeating motifs, Watchmen is a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium”