"None of you have been waiting as long as I have for what you are about to see tonight," said DC Comics president Paul Levitz to a Manhattan screening room packed with journalists earlier this week. The occasion was the East Coast unveiling of an extended sneak peek at Watchmen, already the most buzzed-about film of 2009 - to put it mildly. By some quirk of good fortune, the staff of Movies Without Pity was also in attendance, and although we have to defer to Mr. Levitz on the anticipation front (after all, he was there when the movie rights to the graphic novel were first sold 20 years ago), we can honestly say that the time between the release of the trailer this summer and the theatrical release date spring certainly feels two-decades-long to us.
So we thank the powers that be (in this case, Warner Bros.) for allowing Zack Snyder to present us with our first look at nearly 30 minutes worth of footage from the film, including the opening scene and credit sequence in their entirety. And in turn, we present a recap of what we saw, with as much detail as our overloaded synapses let us absorb. (Editor's Note: If you ever get to a scene that you can't picture, just pick up your copy of the Watchmen graphic novel, and there's a pretty good chance that's what it looks like.)
PROLOGUE
The footage kicks off with stark black logos for Warner Bros, Paramount, Legendary Pictures and DC Comics on a yellow background, very much in keeping with the book's graphic design. It zooms out to be a close-up on a smiley-face button on the fuzzy bathrobe of Edward Blake, a graying, mustachioed man. He's in the kitchen, pouring boiling water from a whistling kettle for tea, and as he walks back to his easy chair in front of the television, you see that there are three rifles over the fireplace and a pin-up illustration of the original Silk Spectre hanging on the wall. Starting to get an idea of what kind of guy he is? Brother, you have no idea.
Blake sits and watches TV, and, as the news talks about nuclear treaties and Russia, we cut to the elderly President Nixon talking at the presidential podium while reading off of a teleprompter about talks with the Soviet Union. We then see footage of nuclear scientists moving the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock into place at five minutes to midnight. Call me ignorant, but I guess I never realized there was an actual Doomsday Clock. I assumed it was one of them, whaddayacallem, metaphors? Go figure!
Cut to a news program, where a John McLaughlin impersonator, doing his best Dana Carvey, is talking to Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift about Dr. Manhattan, the nuclear man, and what role he'll play in this whole situation. All of the actors, by the way, are lookalikes, with makeup. No digital insertions, or old doctored footage. We cut to the show's control room, where they're changing camera angles and watching the show on monitors. We see Blake's coffee table, which holds a pistol and a copy of Hustler magazine. Then, ominously, we're in the hallway of Blake's building, slowly tracking towards his door, which reads Room 3001. I'm assuming that means he's on the 30th floor (or the 29th, if there isn't a 13th floor). Man, I hope he doesn't get thrown out the window! That would be un... savory.
A perfume ad comes on, for Nostalgia by Veidt, with a plane doing loops in the sky over a mansion and a woman poolside. A handsome young man walks across the water towards her. Apparently, this perfume will attract Lords and saviors. Buy some, ladies! Just then, the door is kicked open. It's Jesus! No, it's some mysterious guy whose face we can't see because of all the backlighting, but we can tell he's wearing black leather gloves, tight-fitting black clothes and a knit hat. Blake says, "Just a matter of time, I suppose" -- this visit is not wholly unexpected. So he pours out his tea and hurls the mug at the intruder. The man ducks, and the mug knocks the "1" off of the door, leaving only "300"... which is, of course, the film that made this one possible. You go, Zack Snyder!
After a shot from Blake's pistol misses and kills the television set, the fight erupts, and no part of the apartment is left intact as these two seemingly unstoppable killing machines go at each other. I'm not sure how long Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" has been playing -- possibly since the perfume commercial started -- but it fits the fight, where the intruder tosses Blake around the room like a ballerina. After slamming him into the Silk Spectre pinup, smashing the glass, the intruder puts Blake through his own coffee table, then lofts him onto the kitchen table across the room, smashing that, too. Damn this Ikea furniture! In the kitchen, Blake starts throwing knives, but the intruder dodges one and catches the one, a meat cleaver. Blake draws a third and parries with it, as blows are thrown and blocked, but the intruder ultimately gets the better of him, smashing him through the kitchen counter. As he holds Blake by the collar -- in a shot straight out of the comic book -- Blake croaks, "It's all a joke," and some blood drips off the side of his face onto his pin. (If he didn't have any comic-accurate facial scarring before this fight, which I'm not sure he did, he does now.) Then it's out the window and down 30 (29?) stories he goes. We don't see the impact, as we stay on the bloody pin, but we see the pin bounce on the sidewalk a few times before zooming in and watching a pool of blood spread around it. Again, straight out of the comic book.
[Edward Blake is, of course, the former costumed vigilante and, more recently, government assassin called the Comedian. As seen in this low-quality San Diego Comic-Con footage, the vigilante Rorschach will later visit Blake's apartment to investigate, and immediately discovers Blake's safe room, where he kept his Comedian outfit and weapons.]
OPENING CREDITS
As Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing" plays over it and the credits run under it, we see a series of filmed sequences, with no dialogue. Some are taken from different flashbacks within the main narrative of the book, but many are based on descriptions in Hollis Mason's autobiography, "Under the Hood." They include:
- The original Nite Owl punching a masked thug in slow-motion, with posters of the cover of Batman #1 papering the wall in the background.
The Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino) holding up a newspaper headline that mentions her for photographers while posing with policemen on the town hall steps. All of the cops are checking her out, and the older cop beside her is craning his neck to peer down her shirt. Carla Gugino is unaware of any of this.
- The younger Comedian, in his original yellow costume, is posing for pictures with a bank robber -- and his clearly labeled loot bag bearing a giant dollar sign -- in a headlock. Man, they don't make loot bags like that anymore.
The original Minutemen -- Silhouette, Mothman, Captain Metropolis, Nite Owl (I), Dollar Bill, the Comedian, Silk Spectre and Hooded Justice -- pose for a image that hangs on the Comedian's wall.
- Silhouette stalks through Times Square during V-J Day, eying all of the pretty nurses before finally choosing one and bending her over backwards to kiss her full on the lips, in a duplication of the famous photograph. This one is a lot hotter, though.
- Dollar Bill is shown dead, slumped inside the revolving door that caught his cape as he rushed to foil a bank robbery. He has been shot several times, and the police are examining the scene.
- The Minutemen are shown enjoying a dinner together, with the Silk Spectre (I) pregnant at the center, the Comedian leering at her on her right and her husband/agent Laurence Schexnayder on her left. The entire tableau resembles The Last Supper.
- Mothman is dragged to a white ambulance by two orderlies. Mothman is kicking and screaming, and bites one of the orderlies on the arm.
- Silhouette and another woman, in lingerie (maybe her nurse friend?), are seen lying on a bed with gunshot wounds to the head, as the police set up lights to investigate the crime scene. Scrawled on the wall, possibly in blood, are the words "Lesbian Whores."
- A man walks out of a room and pulls on his jacket, rubbing a freckled, red-headed boy's head as he walks by. Another man, who was waiting and reading a newspaper about Russia having nuclear weapons, gets up form his chair and walks into the room, where a woman is waiting. The boy is Rorschach, and the woman is his mother, and she may not know it, but she's creating a vigilante.
- A John F. Kennedy lookalike shakes hands with Dr. Manhattan, wearing a suit, on the lawn of the White House.
- In a motorcade, JFK is shot. We pan away from the car speeding off to the Comedian, who is behind a nearby fence, lowering his rifle to walk away.
- Silk Spectre argues with her husband as young Laurie looks on. We pan over to a snowglobe, which she may or may not break later, depending on how much more Zach Snyder needs to cut to get the running time the studio wants.
- Two criminals are found tied to a fire hydrant, unconscious, and we pan down to see a note left at the scene with Rorschach's face drawn on it.
- Fidel Castro and some Russian officials watch as planes streak across the skies over Moscow, and we pan down to see missile transports driving in parade formation down the street.
- In a reference to the 1967 anti-war demonstration that produced this photo, a female, hippie-looking protestor walks up to aimed rifles held by American soldiers, and puts a flower in one of the barrels. We see a close-up of the flower going in, followed immediately by the rifles being discharged. It can be presumed that the woman and many other protestors are killed. Man, this alternate reality seemed awesome until that happened.
- Andy Warhol talks to the press about his latest painting, one of his repeated-image portraits, this one of the new Nite Owl.
- An Astronaut plants the U.S. flag on the moon, then turns to us and we can see the reflection of Dr. Manhattan standing there filming him.
- Ozymandias (a.k.a. Adrian Veidt) standing outside Studio 54, as David Bowie (in full Ziggy Stardust mode) and Mick Jagger lounge against a car and the Village People look on from the crowd. Wow -- he knew the Village People?
- The new Crimebusters team, including the Comedian, Ozymandias, Dr. Manhattan, the second Silk Spectre, the second Nite Owl and Rorschach, pose for a group photo, similar to the original Minutemen shot.
- On a TV screen, Nixon is being re-elected thanks to presidential term limits getting repealed. We track outward to see that a man is spray-painting "Who Watches the Watchmen?" on the window of an electronics shop where the TV is on display. We track out further to see someone lighting a Molotov cocktail, then hurling it through the shop window, causing an fiery explosion. This is the same explosion seen in the first trailer. End credits.
THE BIRTH OF DR. MANHATTAN
This scene, a flashback in which Dr. Manhattan -- who, as a being of almost pure energy, simultaneously exists at all points of his life -- remembers how he became a living God, is almost exactly as it appears in the comic book. The scene begins with Manhattan appearing on Mars, having teleported there upon learning that he may be responsible for giving those closest to him lethal doses of radiation. He looks at a photograph in his hand, and flashes back to when it was taken in 1959, when he was Jon Osterman, nuclear physicist. The photo is of himself and Janey Slater, a fellow physicist, on a date at a local fair. After the photo is taken, they kiss, and just when you start to think that these two people are far too good-looking to be physicists, their mutual physicist friend Wally Weaver, who introduced them, walks by with his date. Wally wears thick-framed glasses and is kind of dorky-looking, which almost balances out the model looks of actors Billy Crudup and Laura Mennell.
Cut to 1981, where an older Wally is lying in a hospital bed, looking deathly ill. Dr. Manhattan's voice-over tells us that he's dying of cancer.
Back in 1959, Jon wins a prize at the fair, and gives the stuffed animal to Janey. I don't know what that stuffed cat is laced with, but we see the two of them at home in bed together, having the sex. (How do nuclear physicists do it? KA-BOOM!) I don't know if this is the same night as the fair, but it is definitely One Month Before the Accident, according to Manhattan's description of the event, which has far too few details.
At the research facility, we see Jon, Wally and Janey walking down the hall to the cafeteria, when Jon realizes he forgot his watch. He goes back for it, finding it in the intrinsic field generator chamber, where the door closes behind him. The countdown begins, and he realizes he can't get out. Wally and Janey come back to find him, and Wally tells him there's nothing he can do. Lightning is beginning to play across the walls of the box. Janey starts to cry, tells Jon that she can't watch, then runs off to find another boyfriend.
Some of what follows has been seen in the first Watchmen trailer. Lightning crackles up Jon's arm hair, and he looks at his watch, which starts to slow down, or perhaps our perception of time does. Manhattan flashes back to the first time he met Janey, when she bought him a beer, the first time a woman had done that for him. At the time of the accident, Wally backs away from the chamber. We go back to Jon's teen years this time, when he was being taught how to take apart and put back together the minute gears of a pocket watch. His father stands over him and helps him. In the chamber, adult Jon convulses once and is then torn apart by the intrinsic field. Even his skeleton is vaporized. We see much more viscera than the trailer allowed.
A "token funeral" is held, since there is no body. But later, a glowing circulatory system is seen near the facility's outer fence. It's like a giant jellyfish-man; the MP on duty looks pretty freaked-out. Later, a partially muscled skeleton, also glowing, is seen in a hallway, and it slams against a wall before dissipating into an expanding energy wave that knocks the janitor off his feet. (This shot and part of the are seen in the trailer.) , we see Wally and Janey eating lunch in the cafeteria, looking pretty depressed, when the whole place starts to shake. The blue, glowing body of Dr. Manhattan materializes in mid-air, as small metal objects like spoons and forks orbit around him. We see a close-up of Janey's face, as a spoon drifts by, and she says, "Jon?" Cut to a newscaster reporting that "The Superman has been discovered, and he's American."
We see Dr. Manhattan wearing a suit at a press conference, as he voiceovers an explanation of his superhero name. It's meant to be an ominous reference to the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Later, in his first superhero outfit, which looks like a wrestling singlet, he marks his forehead with a drawing of a hydrogen atom. At a test of his abilities in the New Mexico desert, Manhattan points at a tank, disassembles it into its component parts, then mashes them back together into a giant ball and drops it. We see him meeting with Nixon, who asks him to go to Vietnam, and he goes, ending the war within a week. We see Viet Cong troops kneeling in front of him as if in worship, as he voice-overs that many of the enemy generals asked to surrender to him personally. (He was still wearing pants in those days. Otherwise, they might have been happy waving to him from a distance.)
Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, is seen at a press conference, hawking his book, Under the Hood. Manhattan intones that Mason called him the first true superhero, and we are shown a scene of Manhattan walking into some dive bar (possibly the same one Nite Owl fought in in the credits), pointing at a gangster with a gun and blowing him up. Blood and bones hang from the ceiling, and a dancing girl screams silently. We see Manhattan's old friend Wally Weaver on a talk show, and hear him explain himself: "I didn't say 'There is a Superman, and he's American,' I said 'There is a God, and he is American.'" Janey is shown sitting by the tree at Christmas, when Manhattan gives her a pair of earrings in the shape of his symbol. His blue glow drowns out the red and green of the decorations.
The year is 1970, and Manhattan is at the first meeting of the new Minutemen with his wife. He looks at Silk Spectre's daughter, Laurie, a.k.a. the new Spectre. She looks back at him with a look that will make every man in the theater adjust how they're sitting. (She is very interested.) In the shot, the two of them are making out on a rooftop, and of course, the shot is Janey packing. Manhattan voice-overs that Janey calls the teenage Spectre "jailbait," and that she thinks he's strayed because she's getting older. Manhattan agrees that she is aging more rapidly every day. She removes her earrings and throws them at him. They stop in mid-air a foot away from his face, and hover there as he looks at them, trying to remember where he put the receipt.
Back on Mars, in the present day, Manhattan takes one last look at the picture of him and Janey from the fair and lets it float to the ground. Then he floats in mid-air, with his legs crossed and his back to us (thankfully), and begins to create a translucent, clockwork castle. It rises out of the ground already formed, but new, more intricate parts are created as the rubble falls away, and we cut to a shot high above the planet, as the sun cress over the horizon, casting light on the small but still-visible structure.
THE JAILBREAK
Having just rescued people from a blazing tenement fire, Laurie Juspeczyk and Dan Dreiberg lie in each other's arms, naked, their naughty bits covered by bits of the Owlship's equipment. They're discussing breaking Rorschach out of prison. They think that if Manhattan leaving Earth, Ozymandias getting attacked and the Comedian getting killed are all connected, then it would be good to have Rorschach on their side to help make sense of it. They don't believe that Manhattan gave those people cancer -- after all, Laurie is fine, and she lived with him. It's decided -- felonies good, superhero sex good, conspiracies bad.
The Owlship swoops over the prison, which is lit up, as alarms sound and rioting prisoners can be seen running to and fro and fighting with guards. A shot of the prison rooftop is broken as Silk Spectre rolls into frame and stops. She looks up at the ship, which is soaring away as Nite Owl glides into frame on his cape. Man, that's straight out of a Batman movie. But how else are you going to glide in a cape, if not like Batman? They walk into the cellblock, and no one seems to notice them. A group of cons are shouting at the end of the hall and trying to get into a guard's glass-encased booth. One of the cons finally notices the duo, and charges down the hall at them. He is quickly dispatched. They come one or two at a time now, and Nite Owl and Spectre take them down one by one, like Batman and his really hot, stiletto heel-wearing Robin. At one point, Spectre crouches down, and Nite Owl steps on her back to launch himself into a flying kick. By the time they get to the end of the hall, they've taken down 20 or 30 convicts. The guard comes out of his booth and points a gun at them, but Spectre knocks him out. What a jerk!
At this point, we see Big Figure, the dwarf crime boss who was put in prison by Rorschach, running in fear. (He's played by Danny Woodburn, "Mickey" of Seinfeld fame.) Presumably, his henchman have just been horribly killed by Rorschach, and he knows he's . Sure enough, Rorschach is close behind, and when Big Figure enters a bathroom, Rorschach goes to follow, but is stopped by Nite Owl and Spectre, who have just rounded the corner. In a gravelly voice not unlike the voice Christian Bale uses when he's Batman, Rorschach says he'll just be a minute; he needs to use the restroom. His rescuers exchange glances, as if to say, "Can you believe this guy, going to the bathroom at a time like this?" They should have been looking at the door, though, because once Rorschach goes through, it swings back open wide enough for us to see him backing Big Figure into a corner, and drawing a knife. He comes out a moment later, after apparently flushing the toilet, and they leave. Behind them, a lake of blood gushes out from under the door. Poor Mickey. The Owlship flies off, leaving the prison behind.
WE'RE GONNA NEED A MONTAGE
The last clip Zack Snyder showed us was a collection of short shots, almost like a trailer -- it was definitely promotional, since it ended on the release date. While some of the clips have been seen in the first trailer, others were new, or at least continuations of scenes we had seen, including:
- The Comedian dropping from his perch on the front of the Owlship during the riots.
- Nixon in his war room.
- Laurie walking through the tenement fire.
- A giant Dr. Manhattan reaching down through the domed ceiling of Adrian Veidt's Antarctic fortress to grab Ozymandias.
- Laurie and Dan Dreiberg in the throes of passion on board the Owlship.
- Dan's dream sequence, in which he and Laurie kiss while a nuclear bomb goes off in the background.
The screening room lights go back on as the audience's brains finish melting in wonderment.
Read what director Zack Snyder and co-creator Dave Gibbons revealed about the graphic novel's long journey to the big screen.