Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Guards is widely regarded as a classic and one of the greatest graphic novels of all time – Zack Snyder’s 2009 live-action adaptation? Not so much. It’s one of the few films that I actually walked away from. As a fan of the original source material, it felt like watching a bad tribute band murder my favorite songs.
So I’m both excited and excited about the first trailer for Guardians: Chapter 1Warner Bros.’ new animated adaptation. It seems like the film the live-action version should have been, so it’s fair to say it has the potential to be one of the best superhero movies ever made.
Like the original, this is not for kids: it’s a dark, dystopian R-rated nightmare set in an alternate history 1980s USA. Guards follows a group of outlawed superheroes who are forced out of mandatory retirement by the murder of one of their own. As we soon discover, these superheroes aren’t so super – and they’re not so heroic.
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The idea of a dark, morally conflicted superhero story may not sound shocking now, but in the 80s the comic series Guards And Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – which came out at the same time – transformed the genre. And Guards is not only a complex story that is well told, it is also visually stunning.
The makers of Guardians: Chapter 1 have clearly made an effort to retain that visual ingenuity, and the scenes involving Dr. Manhattan in particular work much better as animation than they do in the film.
It also sounds pretty great, and the film adaptation has a great voice cast. IGN defeated, the votes included:
- Matthew Rhys as Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl)
- Katee Sackhoff as Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre)
- Titus Welliver as Rorschach (Walter Kovacs)
- Troy Baker as Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias)
- Adrienne Barbeau as Sally Jupiter (Silk Spectre)
- Corey Burton as Captain Metropolis
- Michael Cerveris as Jonathan Osterman (Dr. Manhattan)
- Jeffrey Combs as Edgar Jacobi (Moloch)
- Gray DeLisle
- Kelly Hu
- John Marshall Jones as a beheaded judge
- Max Koch
- Phil LaMarr
- Yuri Lowenthal as Wally Weaver
- Geoff Pierson as Hollis Mason (Nite Owl)
- Dwight Schultz
- Jason Spisak
- Kari Wahlgren as Janey Slater
- Rick D. Wasserman as Edward Blake (the comedian)
They already had me at “Harry Bosch is Rorschach”.
I’m excited about this, but I’ll have to wait a while to watch the whole thing: it doesn’t come out until August 13th. But that doesn’t mean you can’t Guards in the meantime fix it. If you’re in the US, HBO’s great Guards The TV show – which was inspired by the graphic novel but told a very different, yet equally shocking story – is now available to stream on Max. People in the UK can watch it on Sky or Now, while people in Australia can stream it on Foxtel Now and Stan.
Guardians: Chapter 1 will be released digitally on August 13 and on 4K UHD and Blu-Ray on August 27. Guardians: Chapter 2 will follow later this year.