I’ll have to say, the writers knew how to hit the unsettling beats in the first episode to match the original. I hope they can back it up.
But woah, I don’t know what to make of the Oklahoma! subtext. Making Rogers & Hammerstein’s musical a screwy centerpiece of modern culture just seems bizarre to me. Even if I can sing the whole thing (I had a childhood filled with musicals), the world that somehow ended up with that in its brain in 2019 is going to have to have a good reason to exist. They’re gonna have to explain that twist.
Eh. I saw the movie years ago and really dug it - side note, that opening montage set against The Times They are A-Changin is brilliant and one of the best I’ve ever seen - but I just can’t bring myself to watch another project that Damon Lindelof is running. After seeing how he blew the ending of LOST and mangled the Prometheus script, it is just abundantly clear that the man has no idea how to pay off any of his ideas. All he’s adept at is posing questions and never resolving them. Hard pass for me.
Instead of the squid, Veidt creates an energy weapon based on Dr. Manhattan’s powers and uses it on NYC and several other major world cities, thus convincing the governments that Manhattan himself is the threat they need to unite against.
Watch The Leftovers.
Watch. The Leftovers.
Watch. The. Leftovers.
WATCH. THE LEFTOVERS.
It made up for Lost. And then some. Started slowly with people you hate (and I liked the first season), and then became something beautiful. Suprising. Amazing. Sad. Takes you places you really wouldn’t predict.
His large debt from Lost is repaid with that. He’s got credit now.
I’ve never watched Prometheus, Alien series, like Terminator series, is a poisoned chalice as far as I’m concerned.
The clipping of Veidt declared dead was interesting. Indicating that Veidt’s money is what led to the election of Redford and in 1992, not 1988 (as the comic alluded to when Redford may run).
And the whole notion that technology stopped after the squid event as people thought it was tech that led to the whole thing (or maybe made the interdimension beings aware of humanity?) and they are just coming back to reintroducing computers and whatnot.
I read an interview with Lindelof that says almost exactly this. He was looking for a central idea to build the new series around, and determined that racial tensions in America today filled the same niche that Cold War anxiety did back when the original Watchmen was written. I think it was a very astute choice.
From what I’ve seen in the first episode, I think that he’s also done a great job at showing something we don’t often see, a left-wing dystopia. In the universe of the show Robert Redford has been president for something like 20 years, term limits having been abolished. It’s interesting to see the imagined effects of pushing the pendulum too far in that direction, although clearly the Seventh Kavalry aren’t exactly heroes either.
Which again is a good continuation of the theme of the comic, in which there really aren’t any good guys. Overall I’m very impressed with the world building and am looking forward to the rest of the series.
I was extremely bothered by the incredibly awful policing in a world that seems to be a semi-fascist state. The raid on the cattle ranch was possibly the stupidest attack outside of a Dolph Lundgren action movie, and the chief’s driving off by himself was so criminally idiotic that I can only believe that the whole thing is a trick and he’s not dead.
The critics were given six episodes and seem to unanimously say that it improves greatly from the first. It had better. This was interesting in the potential of what it might say and awful in every way it said it.
…in case nobody has mentioned this yet: WATCH THE LEFTOVERS.
Its simply brilliant. And he stuck the landing.
One of the biggest things I got from the Leftovers though was how Lindelof runs his writing room. SPOILERS ON THE FOLLOWING LINK. This article goes into depth about how the room is run, don’t click on it unless you’ve seen the entire series. Link.
I’m only watching Watchmen because its a Lindelof show. I would have had zero interest in it otherwise.
It seems to me that the right-wing authoritarian police force is being constrained by the demands of the left-wing authoritarian government, since the cops need permission to unholster their weapons and it required a force-wide meeting and a vote to grant them the authority to conduct the raid. The guy in the panda mask appears to be in control of authorizing the use of force, and it seems like he’s a political appointee whose views don’t align with the chief’s.
Perhaps the chief wasn’t allowed to request an escort?
He said as he was leaving his house that he would have one of the officers drive him, then he waved them off. That’s either stupidity or deliberately misleading.
He also got out of the car without using a radio or phone to notify anyone. Are there cell phones in this world?
There could be all sorts of reasons for that though. There are some rumors that the Chief may have been working both sides (and thus didn’t want those other officers around when he got to the hospital). Or the call wasn’t from the hospital in the first place and he was going somewhere else.
And no, according to the HBO link upthread, they just reintroduced computers to the police department and therefore cell phones are definitely not in the mix (remember the police call to meet up due to emergency came over pager).
One more minor quibble with the synopsis: there was at least a second person with super powers, an unnamed ‘human sensitive’ that Ozymandias’ team cloned the brain of to make the squid… directly fearsome. Plot-relevant, but not a character who appears or gets a name.
That was my immediate reaction to the first episode: “This would probably make no sense whatsoever to someone who hadn’t read the comics or watched the movie”
According to one of the “memos” in the link above, certain tech was restricted back in the 90s. So we can expect to see a lack of computer/internet/cell phone tech.