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

5. The Production Value Is Top Quality

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.