'Watchmen' vs. 'Star Trek': You may choose only one!

Because coming back to work after a hellaciously short weekend isn’t painful enough, I now present the ultimate Sophie’s Choice scenario for sci-fi geeks and blockbuster lovers alike: View the spankin’ new trailers for Watchmen and Star Trek below, and then tell us, if you could only see one of ’em, which would it be?

Unlike my colleague Marc Bernardin, who blogged about the Star Trek trailer over the weekend, I am not a Trekkie/Trekker (though I’m married to someone who can sometimes be found watching DVR’d Next Generation episodes when I’m out of the house or asleep). And maybe that’s why even though J.J. Abrams’ franchise update looks exciting, I think I’m gonna have to go with Watchmen. Its trailer is decidedly dark, in both tone and color, and while that means certain scenes practically disappear from my dinky computer screen, the flashes of each character — particularly Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian and The Comeback‘s Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre — look pretty amazing. I’m sure my excitement for Watchmen is further primed by the fact that I read Alan Moore’s terrific source material only a month ago, but from this vantage point, Watchmen looks different from anything I’ve seen on screen in a while. The Star Trek trailer, on the other hand, while it certainly has its share of adrenaline-elevating action and explosions and outer-space-y bling, might be, at certain moments, mistaken for a CW TV series (kid Kirk jumping out of convertible at cliff’s edge), an Army recruitment ad (“you feel like you were meant for something better, something special”), and maybe even a very special episode of Battlestar Galactica (those outer-space battle sequences).

But that’s just me. And while you could argue that a Team Star Trek vs. Team Watchmen showdown is nothing more than an artificial controversy, it’s also a fun one. So quit sitting on the fence, PopWatchers, and pick your team in the poll below (then drop down to the comments section and tell us why)!

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