HBO's Watchmen is audacious and unsettling in the way it makes racial violence the superhero's origin story

Slate

"Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s new HBO series set in the same universe as the famous comic book of the same name, is an energetic, unruly show with a very concise and ambitious objective: to reframe this particular superhero saga, and by implication all the rest of them too, as fundamentally about race and racism," says Willa Paskin. "Sprawling over 100 years of history, distinct genres, the American landmass, and various locales in the solar system, Watchmen has a cast of dozens and a contagious dystopian angst as well as a giggly playfulness. This alternate universe is the show’s sandbox, and it not only builds parallels to our present political circumstances, it kicks up gonzo superhero shenanigans, inventive futuristic doohickeys (phone booths to Mars; flying paparazzi), stellar jokes about Schindler’s List (really!), and a great gag involving a giant blue dildo. The show, which debuts on Sunday, crashes pell-mell through plots and ideas and sometimes gets up wobbling, but it’s always circling the centrality of race to any American story about good and bad guys." Paskin adds: "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."

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• Drop-dead fantastic Watchmen is many things at once: Watchmen, says Hank Stuever, is 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." He adds: "Watchmen, billed as a 'remix' of the source material, is full of surprises — the first being that (Damon) Lindelof, in collaboration with excellent co-writers, has broken his own spell and discovered that momentum and meaning can go hand in hand. Rather than hoard its biggest secrets in teasing reserve, Watchmen comes across like a smart, swift kick to the gut."
• Watchmen both borrows and rejects the conventional superhero: "If there’s a counterpoint to the ever-inflating superhero bubble, it’s HBO’s decidedly non-heroic adaptation of the indelible Watchmen property, here not to burst or pop but to proselytize the non-believers," says Brandon Katz. "Genre fans will fawn over Damon Lindelof’s reimagining of Alan Moore’s polemic graphic novel, which tore into conventional superhero worship with commentary razor sharp enough to make Wolverine look like a Q-tip by comparison. There’s more than enough cape-and-cowl familiarity here to feed the insatiable appetites of the existing faithful. But where Watchmen eagerly separates itself from the crowded pack is with its ability to remix the genre’s best elements while breaking away from its inviolable guidelines to appeal to audiences who have never harbored an iota of interest in the comic book world. In a way, Watchmen follows Joker‘s formula as an amalgamation of old school psychological noir-ish character studies that just so happen to be wed to superhero IP. As such, it features a few key similarities and departures from previous efforts within the genre."
• Part of the joy of Watchmen is in seeing how it borrows elements from the comic to completely invent its own story: "If you’ve never read the comic or seen its 2009 movie adaptation, you’re going to be just fine. There’s both weirdness aplenty and a serious meditation on what it means to live in a world where systems have run amok and the authorities pretend that encroaching fascism, rising white nationalism, and approaching environmental collapse are just the way things are supposed to be," says Emily Todd VanDerWerff. "And it’s all filtered through a collection of superhero tropes and motifs, which Watchmen uses to tell stories about the world we live in today and how unjust it is. The events that ended the comic — in which one character saves the world through a horrible, horrible plan — have endured in the new TV series as a legacy of horror. The world was saved, but it’s also still the world. Nothing got any better. People just had a very real puppetmaster to point to when they insisted their strings were being pulled."
• It grows wearying to watch episode after episode of a project that so heavily borrows from its source material a tone of grandiose, baroque unhappiness: "That Watchmen finds within the graphic novel a story about modern race relations is both admirable and probably wrongheaded, an element that the show more successfully whispers than shouts about," says Daniel D'Addario, adding: "With the central plank of his story defying the sort of metaphorical representation that has characterized his best-known work, Lindelof keeps scribbling in the margins, adding in more and more story that may yet pay off but that takes perhaps undue patience in the interim."
• Watchmen is equal parts insightful and exciting: "Masks, identities, and the murky, muddled truth they form are central themes of Watchmen," says Ben Travers. "If the cops and criminals wear masks, how do you tell them apart? Who’s the hero and who’s the villain? Who, in other words, do you trust? Looking beyond the veils people share with the world, Watchmen finds fundamental truths about an America divided by a lack of faith in itself, its people, and its institutions. 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."
• Fans of the source material are either going to love this Watchmen or despise it: "The latter, perhaps, because of the selective amnesia afflicting reactionary comic fans who insist that the art form 'didn’t used to be political' when it was political from the jump, and progressive more often than not," says Matt Zoller Seitz. "(Alan) Moore and (Dave) Gibbons’s series was released midway through Ronald Reagan’s second term and contained many elements that seemed to warn of latent fascistic tendencies within the United States’ cultural identity, including an obsession with superheroes and supervillains who settled ideological and personal differences through city-leveling mayhem, and often claimed to be acting on behalf of higher principles even when projecting their personal issues onto the world."
• Watchmen reminds us that a costumed enforcer is only as good as the person behind their mask: "And in a bitterly divided society that comes together to throw heaps of money at DC and Marvel, goodness can be relative; one person’s savior is sure to be another’s militant reactionary," says Judy Berman. "(The parallels to police and politicians, both ambiguous forces on the show, aren’t tough to discern.) Why else would we spend so much time arguing over the political alignments of 80-year-old fantasy characters created for the entertainment of children? 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."
• Watching Watchmen is like a slap in the face: "Whereas the movie (sorry) was a brutally faithful adaptation of the source material, the prestige-TV version is an expanded-universe deal (similar to Lindelof’s beloved HBO jam The Leftovers) that will attempt to grapple with a bewilderingly sprawling metaphysical universe, much like Lindelof’s beloved (for the beginning) and derided (for the ending) Lost," says Rob Harvilla. "It looks dark, and grim, and hellbent on providing us with Trenchant Sociopolitical Commentary, which is all as you’d fear and/or expect. It also appears to be very much its own rabid animal that treats the comics as a sandbox, not a rigid blueprint. Just as you might’ve hoped."
• Damon Lindelof is arguably the most divisive man working in TV today, so it makes sense that Watchmen is his biggest risk yet
• Lindelof uses the original Watchmen graphic novel as a device to tell a slow-unfolding, mystery-filled story loaded with explorations of philosophy and politics
• Watchmen is dense with ideas and alive with possibility
• Watchmen is an intriguing rebuttal of its source material
• Its messaging is somewhat muddied: Watchmen wants to end racism, but it's better at telling superhero stories
• It's difficult to fully describe the visual and storytelling audacity behind Watchmen, a series that warps perception in keenly original ways
• Watchmen cheat sheet: Presenting a beginner's guide the HBO superhero drama
• How Watchmen's director staged one of the worst massacres in American history
• Damon Lindelof isn't afraid to piss people off by delving into race and politics: “In order for this to be Watchmen, we have to start with an unsolvable problem, a problem that the most well-intentioned superheroes and vigilantes actually cannot solve,” Lindelof says. “And now we’re in 2019 instead of the ’80s, where it feels like you can’t tell a story about America in any kind of real, historical context that doesn’t talk about race.”
• Yahya Abdul-Mateen II expects viewers to be divided: "They have a hunger. They want something special. They want it to be good. People are going to love it and people are going to not like it. But both of those people are going to tune in and are going to talk about it. I think it’s really exciting.”
• Read the inside story on how Lindelof ended up making Watchmen after rejecting it multiple times
• Why Lindelof purposefully made the first few episodes disorienting: "First off, that’s the kind of storytelling that I’ve always gravitated to, what I call the 'Thursday crossword puzzle,'" he says. "It’s manageable but difficult, and it’s going to take some time. More important, I was trying to replicate the feeling that I had when I read the original Watchmen when I was 13, which was not dissimilar from being dropped on my head. I didn’t know what I was supposed to know versus what I wasn’t supposed to know."
• Regina King recalls Lindelof having the script hand delivered to her house: "I never read anything like this. I’ve never seen this woman before," she says. "She’s so complex. You may have heard me talk about playing complex roles before, but she blew me out of the water.”
• Lindelof plans to help Watchmen newbies with extra material and something musical from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: “We went out of our way to allow the audience to understand that this is not our America," says Lindelof. "I didn’t want people to feel like they had to do a tremendous amount of homework to understand this. But, for those people who are willing to take the red pill and go all the way in, we’re going to make it available to them."