![]() ![]() The television adaptation is being handled by Craig Mazin, who worked absolute wonders with Chernobyl. The video game The Last of Us, about two human survivors suffering through a zombie plague, was an immediate all-time classic, thanks to its heavy emphasis on interpersonal relationships over the instant gratification of a quick kill. Photograph: HBO/Warner Media/Home Box Office That it does, in the end, hold together fairly well is a testament to Lindelof checking the most extreme of his impulses, perhaps.Thrive to survive … Bella Ramsey and Anna Torv in The Last of Us. But because the property is so fundamentally insane, it does seem to barely hold together, threatening to spin apart at the seams at any moment. And it does the best that it can striking a delicate tonal balance between its zanier and its more serious elements. It looks great, and has some very nice world-building and top-flight acting. ![]() So, how good was HBO’s Watchmen series? Better than I expected. ![]() Especially because the show is exploring some really heavy issues, like the structural racism of American society. But once you try to bring the narrative back to the United States, where you are making the case for the plausibility of this alternate reality of Redfordations and ubiquitous beepers, I just found it a little hard to swallow. It was just the right amount of weird and funny and grotesque. When the show can truly flex its weird muscles, it works best in my opinion and that whole subplot was tonally perfect. I really liked Adrian Veidt’s steam punk prison world. And really, Robert Redford becoming the super-liberal anti-Nixon president? You could not have spent like, an additional 30 minutes brainstorming that to arrive at a better idea? In asking these questions, however, you always return to the same starting point which is that essentially the entire property, with its masked vigilantes drop-kicking each other in the face, is too silly to take seriously. Like, why would the US have made Vietnam into a state after winning the war? That doesn’t make any sense at all. There are, of course, things that make no fucking sense which for me detract somewhat from what they are trying to do. The world-building is probably its greatest strength, as it plunges you into an already fully-realized alternate version of 2019. The show looks wonderful and is terrifically acted. Visually, the look and feel is extremely cinematic. I think that given the challenge, this adaptation did about as well as could be expected. ![]() Can such heady material really be framed by such wacky narrative elements, like an all-powerful glowing blue man who walks around with his dick flopping around all the time? Adapting Watchmen well requires threading an almost impossibly thin tonal needle, balancing the dense and heavy thematic content with the outlandishness of the plot and the characters and the setting. This is a show about adult humans beating each other up while wearing Halloween costumes and using beepers that is meant to also be a sort of thoughtful meditation on race and politics and deeply philosophical questions about the rule of law and justice and the nature of the Lockean social contract. This was something Zack Snyder had to wrestle with in his big screen adaptation, and he basically just went for it, embracing the weirdness for better or worse. Adapting Watchmen for television or film is extremely difficult for the simple fact that it is absolutely bat-shit crazy insane. But from the beginning, Lindelof and his team had an almost impossibly hard task. Places and settings and events that are very weird end up having some kind of explanation that serves an essential function of the narrative, so the writing in that sense is tighter than I was expecting. The show raises a number of central puzzles and mysteries but largely resolves them by the end, eventually sticking to a fairly self-contained and coherent narrative arc. Watchmen is such an absolutely fucking bizarre property that I wondered if he would bring that same Jonathan Nolan vibe to the show. The show is the brainchild of Damon Lindelof who sometimes when crafting a story has a tendency to create mystery and ambiguity just for its own sake, not because it advances the plot or the themes of the work (this was the case, more or less, with Lost and Prometheus). Despite the good buzz, I had some doubts. When HBO released its Watchmen series at the end of 2019, the show was an instant hit, a source of frenzied nerd gossip, and well-liked by critics garnering a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. ![]()
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