Watchmen Again

I watched the Snyder film back in 2009 and understood almost nothing. Walked out confused, didn’t bother looking up what I’d missed, moved on. Alan Moore’s universe isn’t built for people coming in fresh. It’s built for people who already care, who want to see the source material translated, who have opinions going in. I had none of those things.

HBO is doing a series version now with Regina King, Don Johnson, Jeremy Irons. The pitch is that ten hours gives you room to breathe with something this complex, that you can make it work for people who’ve never read the comic. HBO’s shown they can do that before—Game of Thrones, Westworld, The Sopranos. They know how to unpack dense material.

The actual plot is simple enough: someone kills The Comedian in an alternate New York. Rorschach investigates and finds a pattern. His old partner comes back in. Dr. Manhattan leaves the planet. It’s a murder mystery built on questions about power and morality, about whether anything matters when you can stop a nuclear war. I followed that much in the film. Everything else was noise.

I’m skeptical the HBO version will fix that for me, but I’m curious whether it’ll try. There’s something decent about an adaptation that respects your intelligence enough to demand patience. Or maybe that’s just how I’m justifying my fundamental confusion. Either way, I’ll probably end up watching it.