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7 Awesome Things From 25 Minutes Of ‘Watchmen’

Yesterday, Complex took part in the exclusive first look at 25 minutes of footage from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film, based on the 1986-1987 comics by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons.

Snyder and Gibbons were on hand to talk about the project, and from the looks of what we saw, the movie is going to be a banger. Check out seven reasons we think the project looks super…

BLUE BALLSINESS

Dr. Jonathan Osterman, a.k.a. Dr. Manhattan, the naked glowing blue “hero” who gains godlike powers when he’s disintegrated in a nuclear physics test chamber, is circumcised. We think. Snyder wasn’t kidding about showing him in all his naked glory, and we had to shield our eyes from his nuclear missile after a while. Lovers of blue balls, rejoice!

FACE VALUE

In the comic, Rorschach, the thugged-out vigilante who attempts to solve the criminal conspiracy at the heart of the story, wears a mask with ever-shifting ink blots. Thanks to movie voodoo, the blots come alive on screen. Prepare yourselves for endless geek sites analyzing what each blot says about Rorschach’s mental state at that very moment!

GAMES OF DEATH

Rather than put out a shitty-looking, underdeveloped console game, the Watchmen team is producing downloadable games that will take gamers back in time to reenact events from hero history. In particular, Snyder mentioned playing as the Comedian and assassinating JFK covertly from the grassy knoll. Fidel Castro has already made a down payment on his download.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

The graphic novel is too vast to include everything in the cinematic cut, but Snyder shot everything—including the parallel “Tales of the Black Freighter” comic-within-a-comic pirate story—and will be releasing that separately on DVD when the film hits theaters. Eventually, he plans to release an ultimate extended edition Watchmen DVD that includes that storyline. It should be great to watch the next time you have 11 spare hours to spend on your couch.

TAKING COVER

My Chemical Romance, which is 100 times less pussy than most emo bands, has recorded a cover of Bob Dylan’s nearly ten-minute song “Desolation Row” for the film. Ten minutes! We repeat—Zack Snyder will not be cut short!

GETTING ACTION

The comic was relatively light on action, implying more than it showed, but Snyder has infused the story with some of his signature, ab-crunching hand-to-hand combat. If you wanted all talk and no action, you’d follow the Presidential campaigns.

GENRE BENDER

The Watchmen comics challenged the superhero conventions of their day, and the film will do the same to comic adaptations. The Dark Knight was the first movie to touch on how strange a man dressed up as a bat would be in the real world, but Watchmen goes ten steps further examining how the world would change if there were heroes with super powers and nutty vigilantes running wild in the streets, and how fucked up they would be personally. Are you really surprised that retired hero Nite Owl needs a costume and some good old fashioned violence to get it up for supersex?