Back in 2005 when Watchmen turned 20, January Magazine gave the iconic comic novel an in-depth review.
“It’s big and important and brilliant and insufferable,” the wonderful Brendan Wolfe wrote at the time. “It’s mythic; it’s gritty. It’s awesome and it’s dumb. In its pages are heroes, anti-heroes and giant, blue-peckered superheroes. There are aliens, street-fighting lesbians and pirates. There are ambiguously evil geniuses and average New Yorkers. When its violence isn’t intimate, it’s global. When the sex isn’t tender, it’s dirty. Watchmen‘s story is part whodunit, part philosophical tract, its writing fierce and groundbreaking, pinched and pedantic. The art is always stiff and always utterly appropriate.”
Watchmen is everything. At times it’s even boring.”
Nearly 15 years later, as we get ready to watch a star-studded HBO version in October, all of these things seem as though they might still be true. Deadline Hollywood summarizes:
Directed by Nicole Kassell from a script by Leftovers alum Lindelof, the pilot for this sequel of sorts to the borderline dystopia depicted in the award-winning 1980s comic series finds an America ruled by long-serving President Robert Redford. Its an alternative 2019 America where the best intentions have seen technology curtailed, the police are now hidden by masks like the outlawed superheroes, and white supremacy has picked up the legacy of the infamous Rorschach.
The series also stars Don Johnson as the Tulsa police chief, Jeremy Irons as an aged and seemingly dispirited Ozymandias, and Jean Smart as a past Silk Spectre. The heavily radiated Doctor Manhattan is in there too, but is unclear to what extent so far.
The official ComicCon trailer, released about a month ago, is below.
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