On Monday night, my boss and I went and saw Zach Snyder's early Watchmen presentation, the twenty-six minute reel that the director has been schlepping across the country over the past few days to show the press.

Watchmen's slowly turning into a can't-miss superhero movie after, for a long time, being known as the unmakeable superhero movie. The acclaimed graphic novel -- the only one of its kind to win the Hugo award and to be on Time Magazine's list of the 100 best novels of the past century -- is big, it's dense, it takes place in a revisionist 1985, and it employs a large cast of superhero characters, only one of whom has real powers.

Whether the average person will still warm to it is still up for debate, but Warner Bros. clearly wants it to succeed; this early presentation is no doubt a calculated way to get the word out as early as possible -- not just among geeks, who have been following its development since two Comic-Cons ago, but for, you know, everybody.

I mention that both my boss and I saw it because we represent both sides: I'm a geek who read Watchmen for the first time a year and a half ago, while my boss knows nothing about it. Watching some of the footage, I was curious how much of it would make sense to him, and was heartened to hear that he pretty much followed everything, minus a small reference or two or five. So I'll take you through the footage, and then report on the Q&A held afterwards with Snyder and the graphic novel's original illustrator, Dave Gibbons.

CLIP #1: OPENING

After some very brief company logos (bathed in yellow, in true Watchmen style), we see an old man sitting in an expensive high-rise watching TV. This is more or less how the graphic novel starts as well -- the old man is Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and in his younger days he was known as the hero the Comedian. On TV, he's watching The McLaughlin Group,