Watchmen

It doesn't have the cool visual poetics of Snyder's opus, of course, nor as many over-the-top cool moments, but it does flesh out the Watchmen universe and its super hero characters in a very sophisticated way, and the depiction of an alternate world past and present is equally worth highlighting. One of the few additions that has fairly deft action, lots of sci-fi cinematography, but still feels quite down-to-earth and compact thanks to a cracking script. (27/06/2021)

The Watchmen series can probably be divided into two halves. The first half often frustrated me; I didn’t understand many things, and overall, it felt like the series had been stitched together hastily. However, the second half dispelled all my doubts. I would even label the penultimate episode as one of the best I’ve ever seen in television. Over time, I really grew to like the story and appreciated the return of familiar characters. Jeremy Irons, in particular, seemed to relish every moment on screen as Ozymandias, and his participation elevated the quality of the final product significantly. In the final two episodes, we also got to see the famous Dr. Manhattan. While I liked his film version more in many respects (being truer to the source material), he still had a certain charm. Kudos to the screenwriters for managing to steer the series to a satisfactory conclusion and tying up all the subplots. Everything fell into place by the end, creating a perfectly crafted puzzle. And the last five minutes, wow, a fantastic ending all around. I give it 82%. (20/12/2019)

Tying into the original Watchmen universe with socially critical blaxploitation might not have been such a bad idea if anyone could believe that this was the author's intention and not just a calculated business plan by the Warners, led by that marketer Lindelof, and I have no reason to believe that it's not just another rich white corporation trying to feed off the current social tensions in the US, which are otherwise a total mess. In Watchmen, this pissed off "we want to be terribly toxic and radical, but we don't have the guts or the capacity" attitude shows up in almost every sub-theme afterwards. Alongside that bunch of sighing amateurs in the role of the positive protagonists, the post-KKK Rorschach community, with its coolness, discipline, and patience, inadvertently looks like the most attractive pillar of this universe, which is probably not what anyone originally wanted. The biggest problem, though, is that as much as the series is indebted to Alan Moore's original work, it is unable to maintain its strongest asset, namely that painful moral ambivalence. Whereas the bitter truth of the original Watchmen was that humanity's existence could only be preserved through well-timed genocide, and the only guardians of that secret were self-appointed heroes sworn to fight crime, the series is unable to work with that bitter truth, insisting on its infantile thesis that crime must be punished, no matter the consequences, and ideally with a happy ending to boot. All of which ends up with practically nothing in common with Moore. It's just another infantile project where everyone frowns, talks dirty (heaaaaavy on the use of force, by the way) and it takes place at night to make you feel like you're watching an adult series. In any case, I'm not denying that it's fun at times. (17/02/2020)

A downright perfect series, and I can't imagine anyone who likes Moore's book not liking this. Watchmen builds on the legendary comic (not Snyder's film) in a seamless, natural, and very clever way, and I'm not exaggerating when I write that I was impressed not only by the ingenious plot and elaborate world, but also by the way they gradually revealed it all. Until about the fifth episode, the questions of "Who, why, how, and what is he doing?" kept coming, and in the second half they gradually started to be answered;and yet there was time for everything, nothing was rushed, and surprise followed surprise until the final episode. Damon Lindelof, who conceived the entire project, has now hopefully risen in value with a lot of people, because even if he’s never managed to write a good script (which is not true, though a certain circle of viewers are convinced otherwise), Watchmen really is a masterpiece. (16/12/2019)

I wanted to give up after the first two episodes, which didn’t seem to me to have a point and were interesting only because of Reznor’s score, and because of the way in which they hit the uninitiated viewer with their total outlandishness and refusal to pander to expectations. However, as the various storylines began to unfold, they suddenly clicked; the link to Moore’s graphic novel and to Snyder’s film turned out to be slick and logical, the reminiscences of Dr. Manhattan were interesting, and we also finally get to see the Big Blue in all his beauty, doing some of his tricks for us. It all felt beautifully crafted like intricate clockwork. I never thought I’d say this to Lindelof (of whom I am not a fan), but here we go: “Bravo! This is your masterpiece as a screenwriter!” (30/04/2020)