Warner Bros. Discovery’s upcoming animated adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen continues to be the gift that keeps on giving (us reasons to elaborately shrug). Today, the studio released a new redband trailer for the upcoming Watchmen Chapter 1, an animated adaptation of the classic graphic novel, that raises a number of questions—none of them as pressing as “What the fuck does Titus Welliver think he’s doing with this Rorschach voice, huh?”
Let’s be clear: We like Bosch and Deadwood star Titus Welliver, an actor who’s done a lot of amazing work both in front of the camera, and in the voice actors’ recording booth. And we grant that the voice role of Watchmen’s breakout psychopathic vigilante is a challenging one, since the guy deliberately talks like a noir detective who’s had a bottle brush jammed down his throat. (Jackie Earle Haley got around it by basically whispering 90 percent of his dialogue in the Zack Snyder film adaptation.) But that doesn’t stop Welliver’s version of the character—who, as Watchmen’s narrator, talks a lot in this trailer—from sounding like every bad impression you’ve ever heard (or done) of Christian Bale’s Batman voice, all rolled into one. It’s incredibly distracting, to the point that we had to keep pausing the trailer to recover before we could actually take in anything else it was trying to do.
Which is, yep, adapting Watchmen, in what looks to be a very faithful sort of way, recreating lots of iconic images from Moore and Gibbons’ original work. (Albeit, with some very stiff-looking faces and figures in the 3D animation.) We’ll give the film a skosh of credit for at least basically matching John Higgins’ glorious color palette from the original comics, but even with heads exploding and hands getting shoved down throats, the whole thing feels fairly superfluous. (It doesn’t help that WBD is kind of shrugging the whole thing into existence, after announcing it years ago under a different management regime; the movie is releasing straight to VOD on August 13.) We do at least have a more confirmed cast list at this point, which, in addition to Welliver, includes Katee Sackhoff, Matthew Rhys, Troy Baker, Adrienne Barbeau, Corey Burton, Michael Cerveris, and Jeffrey Combs.