Watchmen: 7 Ups And 0 Downs From 'It's Summer And We're Running Out Of Ice'

5. The Production Value Is Top Quality

Watchmen HBO Looking Glass
HBO

This should really go without saying given Watchmen is a HBO series, but it's worth pointing out just how good it looks.

It's shot wonderfully, and director Nicole Kassell deserves particular praise for how each scene is composed. There's a clear momentum at play and the tension is immediately apparent, as is the scale of the project. Likewise, set and costume design are also flawless, with Meghan Kasperlik and Sharen Davis both ensuring that the show finds its own aesthetic in a way that also honours the source material.

All the new characters, from Sister Night to Looking Glass and Red Scare, genuinely look like they could've walked off the page of the original comic - albeit with the kind of modern uplift that comes naturally with a story set thirty years later.

However, Watchmen's true quality is best illustrated in how it frames action. There's a grand sequence involving the Owlship and an escaping light aircraft that wouldn't look out of place in a bonafide comic book movie, while the more intimate fight scenes on display in the first episode are fast and fierce enough to evoke memories of those seen in Netflix's Daredevil and Punisher.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.