Even before the Zack Snyder movie, Watchmen was a comic released in the late 80s, written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgins: acclaimed by audiences and critics as a true masterpiece, it tells the story of a Ukronic world where the vigilantes, first legalized and flanked by the police, they then become outlaws due to the law called Keene Act. Watchmen designed by Damon Lindelof tells a story definitely detached from the original plot, but set in the same world, one where the internet and smartphones do not exist. A very particular and rare operation, it immediately found no success in the mind of the creator of the comic, who was not interested in the project. Did he have his right reasons?
No more controllers
The world has definitely changed: if we have seen that the only two Minuteman who continued to work with the government were The comedian e Dr. Manhattan (while Rorschach has taken the path of lawlessness to continue fighting crime), the situation in 2019 (the year in which the series is set) is decidedly different.
While therefore the police force began to wear yellow masks to protect the identities of its members (even by building a work cover and not only for each of them), the symbol of Rorschach he was taken by the Seventh Cavalry, a white supremacy group that is literally establishing a terrorist regime in the city. In between are positioned the protagonist and supporting actors: we have Angela Abar, who while living her cover as a baker in the evening fights crime at the edge of legality, but also the police chief Judd Crawford and other pseudo vigilantes, obviously legalized because they work for the police.
All this takes place in a truly greater context, where America has been with the longest-serving president in history since 1992, Robert Redford, and where a rain of Squid it is the norm for the population. The construction of the world - and its evolution - is fascinating, because it takes up many events (from comics, not from the film) and adapts them to a world that continues to be messed up after 30 years. Here an interesting plot develops, which starts from some flashbacks of the past and carries on up to the present day. We will avoid spoiling some details, but the construction and the pursuit of achieving the goal partly follow the construction of the plot seen in the comic, complete with a thriller component. Although the comic therefore was born to live and die in those only 12 books, all in all the series does not make a bad use of the world of Watchmen, avoiding falling into mere quotationism but building everything in such a way as to be realistic and coherent.
Why Watchmen?
The problem arises, however, when you go to separate the plot of the series from the setting: the historical characters seen in the comics and in the film here are only legends (except for a few), memes of a bygone era that however continues to live ancestral in the DNA of every living being, which for better or for worse resides in a world made up of crimes, violations of the law and a huge gray area that completely erases right and wrong. It will be immediately evident that the war between the Seventh Cavalry and the Police has decidedly deeper repercussions and motivations, and much of this is played by the events shown in the first episode.
The comic before and the film after have taught us that the line that separates right and wrong is really thin, and this series does not forget. The problem, however, arises when, by simplifying the plot, the magical effect experienced in the work of Moore or in the film by Snyder, leaving the floor Watchmen to a simple unnecessary context: because at the end the plot and development are interesting, they follow a really captivating trend and above all they would live well even outside this uchronic world. Surely the intent was to tell a story of the world of Watchmen and not related to the plots of the Minuteman, but in this way the detachment has become such as to make one forget every now and then that some vigilantes lived in that world who, already at the time, stood out for their physical and psychological characterization.
The golden mean
In all this Watchmen is a TV series that in the first 6 episodes (which we saw to review it) manages to play with technique and narration in an excellent way, so as to entice you to watch these episodes for about 1 hour. Like all modern series, the first episode does not try to collect every single element of the show (as instead the procedural TV series do) but is the incipit of a plot that needs to be discovered moving forward: for this reason we recommend not to stop at the first episode. , but like with Game of Thrones or Westworld, you have to move on. The actors still bring well-structured characters to the screen, and the acting rehearsals keep up with HBO's high standards; a play of lights, an avalanche of non-invasive Easter eggs and those yellow writings that appear to announce the episode are just the icing on the cake. Maybe they could also avoid touching Watchmen, as the TV series lives off its flame, but in the end having it in a world that many have not visited for decades can only be pleased. On the other hand, nothing ends. Nothing ever ends.
