Watchmen: Limited Series review by Bobby Blakey
One of the most celebrated graphic novels of all time is Watchmen from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. In 2009 director Zack Snyder brought the famed story to the big screen with a feature film that for me was awesome. Since DC Comics set out to grow the story with merging it into the normal DC Universe and follow up stories. In 2019 the series returned to the screen with a sequel TV series on HBO, but does it do anything to further the stories legacy or should it have stayed on Mars?
Watchmen follows an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws, Watchmen embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name, while attempting to break new ground of its own. I admit as much as I love the graphic novel and the movie, I am not so big of a fan that I know all the ins and outs of the series. I had to revisit numerous things every time something new has come out to remind me what has happened throughout it all. Diving into this series I tried to not do that and let this resonate as something fresh knowing it was still a sequel of sorts to the original source material.
Right out of the gate this series pulls no punches and lets you know that this is a different world than we were introduced to in the comics and movie,
while still very familiar. After watching the first episode I was instantly intrigued, but not fully sucked in. It felt like the world of Watchmen, but so far removed I was concerned that it was going to end up being connected in name and reference alone. Thankfully as it moves forward things start to come full circle and delivered not only a pretty awesome series, but in my personal opinion a great continuation to the source material.
Some might not like the fact that there aren’t too many familiar characters initially, but have no fear there are plenty of them sprinkled in throughout in both action and dialogue reference that ends up being pretty cleverly executed. I ended up loving this series, but it is one that works more as a whole than the individual. Sure there are great episodes, but it’s the culmination of where it goes and how it brings it together with itself the original comic that makes it so excellent.
Everyone here is great but its Regina King carrying the biggest load and does so to perfection. I was also on the fence to what I was going to think about Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias in the way they were portraying him, but ended up being one of the more out there interesting elements to the series. The scariest part of the whole series is how relevant a lot of the elements are now to what is happening in the country and makes way more terrifying.
I am both glad and saddened that this was only a one off mini-series as it is so great that I would love more, but so perfect in its ending that I am happy with its conclusion. In addition to all 9 episodes of the series this release offers up over 90 minutes of bonus content including all-new documentaries, trailers, featurettes and so much more.
Grab your copy of Watchmen: Limited Series available now from Warner Bros, DC and HBO.