Kevin Kelly covered the Watchmen press preview in Los Angeles last week, and the same footage was shown when the preview came to Manhattan yesterday. Kevin’s piece has all the nuts and bolts of what happened in the footage, so check that out if you haven’t, but since I’m fundamentally incapable of fanboy enthusiasm, I thought I ought to weigh in with just a few additional thoughts, from my ignorant/cynical perspective.

With that said… OMGITSFUCKINGAWESOME!!!!!

Just kidding. But not completely. More after the jump.

I think it’s interesting that Warner Brothers and DC Comics are going out of their way to position Zack Snyder’s film adaptation as an impossible dream realized, a movie that no one ever thought could be made, a movie that no one else could make –– especially considering the relatively quick turnaround once Snyder signed on (he started working on the project right before 300 came out on March 9, 2007; Watchmen is currently in post-production and will be released on March 6, 2009). Last night’s presentation was introduced by DC president Paul Levitz, who suggested that Snyder was not only the perfect man for the job, but maybe more importantly, he came along at the perfect time. “The sheer scope of Watchmen required a level of technology, a level of courage, and a level of imagination that defeated three studios,” Levitz said.

But it seems that Snyder wasn’t able to pull all this off (assuming he did — I’ll get into my impressions of the 26 minutes of footage in a bit, but as I’ve warned before, assumptions made on full films based on 20-something minutes are dangerous ones) because he is, to borrow language from Watchmen itself, so much of a superman –– he comes off as a good-natured geek who speaks with the enthusiasm (and confidence, and stubborness) of a little boy, who’s working really, really hard to make the movie that he, as a fan, would want to see.

His initial attraction to Watchmen? Snyder said that as a fan of Heavy Metal magazine, “When people bought me comic books, I was like, ‘No one’s really fucking or dying in this,’” but Watchmen “had this sort of adult quality to it.” Snyder might have the “imagination” and “courage” and techno-savvy to get this job done, but maybe more importantly, he’s got the sensibility of the adolescent male that Warner Brothers will have to attract if they want to push an almost 3 hour (it’s currently at 2:40; it might get shorter, but probably not by much) epic based on an unusually cerebral graphic novel with zero franchise potential into a megahit.

As for the footage itself…Snyder warned that some of the effects in what we were shown weren’t done. I hope this wasn’t in reference to the first few shots of the opening sequence (including a recreation of The Maclaughlin Group with a dead-on Eleanor Clift-alike), or the bulk of the prison fight sequence, because these bits have a realness––as in, you could actually see the grain of the film––that I really enjoyed. If the whole idea of Watchmen is that superheroes (fantasy) are inserted into actual historical situations (reality), then it would only make sense to make that world that they move in look as real as possible. And there does seem to have been an effort to do this. Snyder said that using real sets was a priority, and that only the scenes set on Antartica and Mars used green screen, and although there’s a shot in the opening sequence of someone falling many stories from a building that would seem to give lie to this, it does look like an alarming amount of the footage we saw was shot on real sets. “I just thought it was cooler to build everything,” Snyder said. “Maybe it was 300 backlash, I don’t know. And we couldn’t go to Mars.”

In any case, the footage we saw seemed to veer wildly from noir-lit hyperrealism, to baroquely fake bits bearing the cheesy, painted-over look of 300. This may work in the full context of the film, or maybe when all the effects are done, it’ll all look like the later. I hope not. Of the scenes we were shown, by far my favorite was the sequence showing the origin story of Dr. Manhattan, which blends cinematic realism and digital surrealism exceedingly well. Billy Crudup’s performance as Manhattan/Jon Osterman appears to be extraordinarily subtle for this kind of film, with his voiceover somehow both monotonous and deeply sad. Snyder noted that Crudup performed all of the Dr. Manhattan footage alone on a motion capture stage. “The animators’ job has been to get Billy’s performance on Manhattan’s face,” he said. “It’s completely abstract on set, he’s basically in white pajamas, covered in dots.”

“To me, he looked like Tron with a bad skin condition,” cracked Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons. “He’s supposed to be a god, but [on set], he looks like a clutz.” More seriously, Gibbons commented on the surreal experience of watching his drawings come to life. “To sit in a darkened theater and see it unfold is a little too much like being in my mind, especially because it’s so precisely what I drew.”

Warner Brothers is obviously banking that the film will be huge, but both Snyder and Gibbons referenced some tension between the creative camp and the corporate side, especially regarding Watchmen ancillaries. For one thing, Snyder has ruled out the possibility of a traditional Watchmen 2, although he says that the video game that’ll accompany the film’s release is “as close to a sequel as you’re gonna get.” Rather than a traditional device game (”Video games take a long time to make, and unless you get a nice long lead, you end up with a crappy game”), the Watchmen game will be downloadable.

But the biggest site of friction has to be over the film’s length. When asked how close the film is to a final cut, Snyder said, “I’m pretty close,” and implied that he’s not going to be happy if the studio insists that the film become much shorter. His point of view seems to be that there are plenty of traditional comic book movies out there, and it would be crazy to get this far only to compromise because the studio is afraid that their audience’s attention spans won’t be able to handle Snyder’s full vision. Snyder seems to have faith that the long cut will sell itself. To anyone uninterested, he says, “You can go see Fantastic Four. If you don’t want to get you mind blown.”

Will Watchmen blow minds? Probably. Personally, if the rest of the film carries even a fraction of the subtelty of the Dr. Manhattan stuff we saw, I’ll be happy.