Quis custodiet ipsos eventus?: a review of Watchmen
Created by Damon Lindelof
Based on Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Starring; Regina King; Don Johnson; Tim Blake Nelson; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Andrew Howard; Jacob Ming-Trent; Tom Mison; Sara Vickers; Dylan Schombing; Louis Gossett Jr.; Jeremy Irons; Jean Smart; Hong Chau
I needed a bit of time to digest HBO’s take on the world created by Moore and Gibbons in their graphic novel classic. It wasn’t so much an issue of whether I liked it or not: it was a matter of figuring out what I liked about it and why.
The story picks up some 35 years after the Watchmen graphic novel ends. Most of the masks in the original are dead or retired, or in the case of Doctor Manhattan, buggered off to Mars because humanity has become boring. Rorschach died at the hands of Manhattan, but his journals detail Adrian Veidt’s (Ozymandias) plot to launch a massive squid like creature into New York City, which would, in its death throes, release a psychic blast that would kill millions. Rorschach, no model of mental hygiene, is paranoid, racist, and suffers a variety of social affective disorders. Nonetheless, he has kept meticulous and lucid journals in which he details the plot by Veidt and expresses his own Naziesque philosophy.
If you’re reading this and going, “what the hell is this all about?” then I strongly recommend you get a copy of the original graphic novel and read it, because the series, dense and multilayered and often confusing, relies in large measure on the original material. Without that book, making sense of the show is going to be a massive task. Yes, the original author, Alan Moore, demanded in a cold fury that his name not be associated with this in any way, but Moore does that with every adaptation of his work so don’t assume it reflects on the quality of the show.
Rorschach has, 35 years later, become a cult figure to extreme right factions in the US, including the KKK and various neo-Nazi groups. Wearing Rorschach-like masks, they have become such a powerful and intimidating force that the police are forced to wear masks to conceal their identities, in order to avoid terrorist retribution.
Adrian Veidt is still alive, held in splendid isolation in a magnificent manor from which he apparently cannot escape. He has servants, all cloned from two entities, and his attitude toward them is…dismissive.
The time frame shifts a lot, starting with the vicious racial carnage in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921, and jumping to 2019 and then back to the 50s, to the 80s, and eventually back to 2019.
I began watching the show with low expectations. Quite aside from the fact that Moore’s world is plenty confusing to begin with, the show’s producer Lindelof, had been involved in previous shows such as Lost, where coincidences and conspiracies and plot twists all developed into a grand, unresolvable mess. I could see that happening with Watchmen, especially given the multiple plot lines, time jumps, and deus ex machina, anything with Doctor Manhattan must necessarily involve.
So it wasn’t until the sixth (of nine) episode that I finally sat up and thought, “You know, this is actually fucking brilliant.” And it is. The end is mystifying, but in context with the rest of the story, inevitable and very well done.
If you like to be challenged and challenge yourself, then you are going to really treasure this show. Avoiding the traps of dated politics and cultural referents, it recreates the majesty and sheer weirdness of Moore’s 1985 classic.
Now on HBO.