The Comedian Is Already Dead
Zack Snyder’s 2009 film left me more confused walking out than I was walking in. I went in cold—no Alan Moore, no comic, no context—and spent two hours watching a neon-blue deity obliterate people while someone scored a sex scene to "Hallelujah." By the credits I had no idea who’d won, what they’d won, or whether winning was even the point. The answer, I eventually worked out, was: nobody, nothing, and no. But working that out took longer than it should have.
So I have some personal stake in the HBO Watchmen series going well. The cast alone suggests this isn’t being treated as a genre exercise: Regina King, Don Johnson, Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Louis Gossett Jr. That’s not a superhero roster. That’s an awards-season ensemble that somehow ended up in masks.
The setup, for the uninitiated: in an alternate America where costumed heroes are a recent and complicated historical memory, a man called The Comedian—government-sanctioned, brutal, not particularly heroic—is murdered in New York by someone strong enough to throw him through a window. His old colleague Rorschach, the obsessive and uncompromising one, starts pulling threads and suspects a conspiracy as other former heroes begin to fall. Dr. Manhattan, a genuine omnipotent being built from a physics accident, retreats to Mars after a personal scandal. An assassination attempt on Ozymandias. Moloch, a former villain attempting a quiet retirement, shot dead. Rorschach lured into a trap, arrested, and his old partner Nite Owl II dragged off the couch and back into a world he thought he’d finished with.
How closely the series will follow Moore’s original—and how much it treats the comic as a launching pad—remains to be seen. HBO has earned patience on this: The Sopranos, Westworld, the good years of Game of Thrones before it lost its nerve. They know how to make dense material feel inhabited rather than just complicated. Making something dense and felt is the harder trick. I’m hoping they manage it. Mostly I want to understand what I walked out of the first time.