HBO has long made telling great American stories a hallmark of its prestige as a TV network, but its 2019 adaptation of an all-time classic still managed to turn heads. This series was inspired by a very different kind of literary work from the American novels of old. What’s more, it isn’t even a direct adaptation, strictly speaking.
Instead, Damon Lindelof’s groundbreaking screen rendering of Watchmen is a sequel of sorts to the work widely considered, by critics and fans alike, to be the best comic book ever created. First published by DC Comics as a limited series between 1986 and 1987, Alan Moore’s subversive superhero story, innovatively illustrated by David Gibbons, completely revolutionized the art form.
It took over 30 years and other less impressive attempts at adaptation, but the one screen version of Watchmen worthy of its source material is something very special on its own terms. This HBO release is a superhero show in which every episode is pretty much perfect, from performances to visual effects and musical score.
Watchmen Is A Sequel To Alan Moore’s Legendary Comic Book Series
The greatest comic book Alan Moore ever wrote, DC’s Watchmen turned the superhero genre on its head almost singlehandedly. It tapped into the zeitgeist of Cold War angst and Gen X disillusionment, and shattered the rose-tinted lens through which individual, all-American heroism was portrayed in comic after comic.
Rather than trying to bring Moore’s landmark publication to the screen directly, Lost and The Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof shrewdly decided to use the original comic book as his jumping off point to develop a sequel set in the 21st century. The result is arguably the most profound comment on race relations in the superhero genre.
HBO’s Watchmen leans into the nihilistic subversions of the work that inspired it, serving as a powerful critique of contemporary society, at the same time as paying a fitting tribute to the genius of Moore and David Gibbons’ comic book series. The show couldn’t be further from previous screen iterations of this graphic literary masterpiece.
There’s a school of opinion that HBO’s Watchmen is better than almost any superhero movie out there today, which is no mean feat. One superhero movie it’s certainly better than is Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the original comic book on which it’s based.
Snyder took the task of rendering Alan Moore’s work onscreen a little more literally than Damon Lindelof. While he did an admirable job turning the wildly brilliant visual artwork of David Gibbons into a lively motion picture, his 2009 film version of Watchmen has little of the philosophical depth and cutting irony at the heart of the comic.
Besides its apparent reference to the movie in the episode “Little Fear of Lightning”, HBO’s TV iteration of Watchmen has nothing to do with Zack Snyder’s adaptation. Its story might be different from the one Alan Moore wrote, but it’s far closer in tone and spirit to his comic-book original than Snyder’s big-screen version could dream of being.
Alan Moore Aside, HBO’s Watchmen Is Deservedly Acclaimed
It was predictable enough that Alan Moore didn’t react positively to HBO’s Watchmen, given that he’d already disowned his own comic-book version by the time it came out, and is famously against adaptations of his work on principle. But his characteristic response takes nothing away from the otherwise near-universal acclaim the show has received.
This extraordinarily ambitious, meticulously realized TV production is as close we’ll ever get to seeing one of America’s greatest and most complex works of literature onscreen. No screen adaptation of Watchmen could ever have been the Alan Moore version, and nor should it even attempt to be. Still, this Damon Lindelof version isn’t a bad second-best.
- Release Date
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2019 – 2019-00-00
- Network
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HBO
- Directors
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David Semel, Fred Toye
