Watchmen (2019)

An inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987...What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of Watchmen provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr.

It is visually astonishing, with each frame more ambitious, stunning, and remarkable than the one before. You also have no idea what the hell is going on at any given moment. If you liked that about Game of Thrones, you’ll LOVE it about Watchmen.

A lavish, transfixing epic, a potent but rarely heavy-handed metaphor for race relations in America and a showcase for one of the greatest actors of her generation, Lindelof’s Watchmen is also a shrewd encapsulation of the perils that might await a society obsessed with superheroes.

Calling it the best new show of the fall feels too limiting, because it’s trying to be so many things to so many people. It left me dizzy from its audacity, its delight, and its occasional lack of taste. Your mileage may vary.

HBO’s drop-dead fantastic new series “Watchmen” is many things at once — a righteously topical, thrillingly conceived riff on race and criminal justice set in an allegorical USA of vigilante cops, shady superheroes and subversive domestic terrorists. It’s fabulous and flammable and feels exactly right.

This is breathtaking, ambitious television that only gets richer with each subsequent episode.

Its greatest rewards are the strength of its perspective, the depth of its humanity, and the risky creative swings it takes to create an entirely new story that also feels right at home in the world of Watchmen.

The series’ scope is astonishing given its subject matter, and even more so given its relentless entertainment value. Through six episodes, “Watchmen” has already provided a bounty of intelligent theories to study and debate, but it’s designed to be one helluva good time, as well.

Watchmen’s HBO sequel series from Damon Lindelof isn’t perfect in this regard, but it’s easy to watch, tough to pin down, and well worth working through.

Visually entrancing, pointedly provocative and all over the place in time and space, Watchmen might make even David Lynch drop his jaw at times.

Told through a complex and riveting mystery, a murder investigation is at the center of “Watchmen’s” first season. It’s up to Angela Abar/Sister Night to do the unraveling. King balances her divergent roles as mother, wife, friend and vigilante with a mix of grace, sincere affection and ferocity. ... After an unevenly paced premiere episode, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this new series. But after episode two I was all in.

Like The Leftovers, it’s a vividly felt tale of generational sorrow, tapping deeper weirdness and structural experimentation as it goes along. Watchmen doesn’t overdose on nostalgia, like so many franchise extensions in our reboot-soaked decade. It’s dangerous, and invigorating. Like the proverbial Space Squid, it blew my mind.

When Watchmen is at its most humane, its most imaginative (as it is in the sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being”), it feels like superlative television. The breadth of its vision, coupled with Lindelof’s imperative to poke at the relationship between nostalgia for the past and destruction in the present, make for storytelling that vibrates with urgency and insight.

Watchmen doesn’t need millions of dollars of special effects. It soars on great writing and performances.

“Watchmen” is not as fun as HBO’s “Succession” — “Watchmen” is more serious — but HBO’s newest offering proves itself a significant and entertaining series that’s resonant and relevant in our fractured America.

Not all of it works, but it’s a fascinating — and frequently thrilling — attempt to rebottle some of the same lightning that Moore and Gibbons unleashed back in the Eighties.

Relentlessly entertaining, odd and creative... Watchmen is a tour-de-force, no doubt, but there's a landing that definitely needs to be stuck.

The book gives anyone attempting to follow it up a richly realized world on which to build, but it's the ways in which this new series diverges from the source material that makes it so compelling.

Weird, weird, weird, but definitely not boring.

It is a bravura series that interrogates power, storytelling and the former embedded in the latter. It has a (still unusually) diverse cast, writing team and cohort of directors in terms of both sex and class, and, even as it strays from Moore and Gibbons’ original content, it honours their underlying ambition: to deconstruct our legends and our myths, ask where they come from, what purpose they serve; and to make us think and think again about who tells us what, why – and why they are the ones who get to do so.

The show is so ambitious, with its multiple timelines, storytelling structures, and perspectives, that it’s perpetually surprising.

“Watchmen” is to the superhero genre what a revisionist Western is to a basic cowboy myth, with John Wayne in the saddle of the national identity. It’s good enough to warrant repeat viewing. Is it coherent enough to withstand it?

He’s packing a punch. Watchmen is a show that will be scoured for clues about yet-to-be-birthed fan theories, even as it’s an intrinsic provocation of the sorts of genre fans who were angered by Star Wars centering women and people of color, or outraged by the suggestion that certain superheroes, James Bond, or Hermione Granger might be black. It’s not just that Watchmen’s main character is a black woman, it’s how the new show reframes what came before it.

In the first five episodes, “Watchmen” feels more loose and comfortable the farther it gets from the racial-history marker it sets down in its opening minutes. It doesn’t deeply reckon with the implications of the Tulsa massacre until the sixth, written by Lindelof and Cord Jefferson. But that hour (the last screened for critics) is a wallop, synthesizing past and alt-present in a stylistic tour de force.

If you’ve never read the comics or you didn’t see the movie, some of the references are going to fly by unnoticed, and it’s going to be a challenge to keep up with all the new developments without knowing about the past events that led to all of this. Still, regardless of your depth of knowledge about this universe, certain episodes stand alone as strikingly effective set pieces.

The cast is owed a lot of credit for keeping the momentum going and the series grounded. ... Though its messaging gets muddled—especially in the sixth episode, which should raise the question of whether some symbols are too entrenched in violent, racist history to ever be repurposed or otherwise subverted—Watchmen is commendably bold in its dive into this country’s fraught past and present.

Like the original, it has a lot to say, and is gorgeously realized with strong writing and performances, particularly from stars Regina King and Jean Smart. But its messaging is somewhat muddied.

You may not always be sure what you're watching, but good luck taking your eyes off Watchmen. [28 Oct - 10 Nov 2019, p.8]

Beyond the embellishments and reimaginings of the source material, the biggest hurdle this Watchmen will face is the way it tells its story. Although each chapter has the feel of a stand-alone, à la The Leftovers, it’s ultimately a highly serialized tale, though one that takes its sweet time easing you into its world and making you work to understand who’s who and what’s actually happening. It’s easy to imagine viewers who aren’t already invested in the very idea of a Watchmen sequel growing impatient with the show’s gradual doling out of exposition.

Using the graphic novel as the scaffolding for a dense, brooding HBO series, Watchmen grafts enough new threads onto its existing mythology to make "Westworld" look like a 1970s sitcom by comparison.

The series expands the comic in some fascinating ways, weaving a dense, bizarre mythology and a richly conceived world to get swept up in. The pilot episode in particular introduces various complicated ideas, drawing clear lines to fascism in the actions of the police and vigilantes. But the series misses some of the novel’s complexity in its eagerness for loaded imagery—lynchings, riots, police violence—and slowly-unfolding mysteries.

No, this isn't your father's (or mother's) "Watchmen," but something new, occasionally thrilling too. Just not consistently so.

“Watchmen” suffers from the sense that anything can happen at any time, so nothing really matters. ... As with “The Leftovers,” the talented cast members do their best to tie together the various portions of the unfocused storyline.