Well, I liked it. It was cute that since none of the actors had read the book before being cast in the movie, they work overtime to impress upon the fans just how seriously and reverently they’re treating it now that they have read it. Actually, Patrick Wilson said some interesting things about how working with a comic as source material enables you to physically see the authors’ vision of a character’s physicality in a way that normal scripts or book adaptations can’t, which gave him more insight into what Dan Dreiberg’s personality is really like. Matthew Goode, who I liked a lot as the cuckold in Match Point (spoiler alert! a cuckold in a Woody Allen movie!), was silent until moderator and crazed Lost theorizer/time-waster Jeff Jensen specifically turned to him, and then he let loose this five-minute monologue about finding Ozymandias’s accent that was pretty much your dream of what talking to an English actor would be like–at varying times he did the accents of an American good ol’ boy and a mincing British homo-secks-sewell, and he cursed up a blue streak. People were just sort of ambiently laughing out loud by the end of it. Crudup was consistently funny too.

Snyder is not his own greatest spokesman but I think he handled things pretty well. It was interesting to hear him say in person something I’ve heard other people mention he’s said, which was that he deliberately made the Dark Knight-attached trailer a creature of the modern superhero genre, song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and all, as a sort of commentary.

I liked the footage, but then, I like Snyder in general. Still, some of my friends who were skeptical about the original trailer liked this a lot better. It was basically a trailer on steroids–no dialogue, just a lot of snippets and images edited together. So you couldn’t get a sense of whether it was going to be acted like Sarah Polley in Dawn of the Dead or Gerard Butler in 300, but you did get a look at all the characters in costume and in action, sets and locales and scenes from across the breadth of the story. They all looked good, inhabited and intimidating. Tons of slow motion, as is his perhaps regrettable wont. When Dr. Manhattan blows people up they explode in showers of gore. As I think I mentioned, watching him and the Comedian run amok in Vietnam is going to get a lot of the politically based critics of 300 and Dawn of the Dead gunning for this movie too.

Maybe the best part, though, were the audience questioners, who were like a parade of High Comic-Con Ridiculousness. The second guy was dressed as Batman, the third like a refugee from the “Sabotage” video, there was a Rorschach, and there was a pair of identical twins who finished each other’s sentences and even had a stock comeback for when Snyder jokingly asked if they were related (“we’re roommates!”). The funny thing is that the room is so big that you had no idea who was up next until their faces/masks showed up on the jumbotrons. Best of all, except for this one douche in a Strangers in Paradise t-shirt who was way too impressed with himself for making crude innuendo about Carla Gugino’s breasts, all of them just got up, did their thing, and split without trying to hog the spotlight.

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