I’ve been re-reading the Watchmen graphic novel while I’ve been traveling to work by bus. Yesterday, I got a tap on my shoulder and there was this girl, kind of cute in a geek sort of way, who smiled at me and held up her copy of Watchmen. We sort of looked at each other, knowing the coolness link we both felt and she walked off the bus.

Just before leaving I had watched a clip from an award show where there was an extended/expanded trailer for the new movie. It was small, grainy but it looked pretty good. When I got home I checked on the web and saw there was a very clear official version of the clip that has been released.

OH MY GOODNESS!

I’m still scared about Watchmen. Let’s be real; this is the Lord of the Rings of comic books, and you can mess it up pretty bad. There’s so much stuff there, so much which lends itself exclusively to the comic book medium, trying to get that to the screen it really doesn’t seem possible. When the first trailer came out, it looked right, it felt right and I was in geek heaven but I had that little ping in the back of my head.

The new trailer has me less worried. There were scenes in the new trailer I recognized from the book. Yes, there were recognizable scenes in the first trailer, but the things I saw in this one, especially one shot which is a spoiler to those who haven’t read the book so I’m not going to say what it is, tells me this might be the real deal. What got me about the scene is it’s a quick scene in the comic, but the way the scene was presented was exactly the way it was in the comic. Considering the type of scene it is, that’s a good sign the people working on this are going to be true to the novel. There were a couple of other scenes that worked out great for me.

Thankfully I was able to download the clip in a HUGE quicktime format and looking at it repeatedly, man this has my geek senses all excited. I’ve put in a few freeze frames from the trailer here. Just click on the picture to see a bigger image of the scene. Understand, even with the bigger size I've loaded, you would have to almost triple the size I present in the large frame to see the image in the original quicktime size I downloaded.