Watchmen: 7 Ups And 0 Downs From 'It's Summer And We're Running Out Of Ice'
Damon Lindelof's continuation of Moore and Gibbons' comic starts with a bang.
After months of build up, Damon Lindelof's Watchmen show has finally arrived. Suffice to say, the pressure of adapting the comics medium's most vaunted text cannot be overstated, but whereas others have tried and failed to capture (some would say cash in on) the same spark found in Alan Moore and David Gibbons' seminal comic, HBO's Watchmen is, for now, off to a blinding start.
A spiritual sequel to the original comic, Lindelof's series finds itself in something of an awkward position. So much of Watchmen works because of the medium in which it was told, and while DC continue to be criticised for mining Moore and Gibbons' work at every opportunity, any adaptation is going to meet controversy.
Fortunately for fans of the original comic, this latest adaptation is less 'Watchmen Babies' and instead something much more considered. It recontextualises the original comic within the prism of our contemporary zeitgeist, whilst adhering to the same tenets that made it so compelling in the first place.
The end result is fascinating, and while other continuations of Moore and Gibbons' work have often struggled to justify their existence, Watchmen's pilot episode thankfully divests from that precedent, proclaiming a vital and indeed necessary continuation that will hopefully get better and better with each episode...