Expect to struggle gloriously with HBO’s involving, multifaceted comic adaptation.
Incident swirls through fearful shining Tulsa.
On Sept. 8, 2019, a policeman conducts a traffic stop, and winds up full of bullets.
Credit: Mark Hill/HBO
The cop is black, the shooter is white, and the bloodshed is an act of terrorism.
The police wear masks, too.
Its a defensive necessity.
Now, beat cops model bright yellow facewraps, nose-mouth-chin covered like theyre robbing banks in the Neon West.
Detectives get to personalize their persona.
The episode begins much earlier, though, amid true events and fake nonfiction.
The kids seen the film enough to memorize the intertitles.
A good thing, since he might never watch it again.
The boy happens to be African American, and outside the theater, theres a goddamn massacre going on.
Its 1921, and white men are scourging the Greenwood neighborhood, raining bloody hell.
Heres the moodWatchmenlaunches from: The end of the world, 99 years ago.
That real-life event sparksWatchmens hysterical fiction, though its not immediately clear how it connects together.
What does all this have to do with the trillionaire buying farmland in the Sooner State?
How doesthatrelate to the FBI agent hunting down masked vigilantes?
Is it relevant that God exists, and hes a crummy blue ex-boyfriend who lives on Mars?
Thats a normal event in this America, but we all have our extreme weather patterns.
The TV series comes fromDamon Lindelof, co-creator ofLostandThe Leftovers, who meticulously honors Moores revised history.
Angela was born in Vietnam, the 51st United State.
Major characters from the text reappear, thirty years older, looking great.
Laurie (Jean Smart), once the second-generation Silk Spectre, is now a federal agent.
Theres more, much more, in the six episodes Ive seen from this nine-episode debut season.
The comic is a sacred piece of culture, the kind of totem thatyoung blowhardswill inevitably declare untouchable.
(Great opening credits, downhill from there.)
So Lindelofs series risks third-railing multiple strands of outraged fandom.
Old characters reappear in troubling ways.
Nerd fury is a crushing phenomenon this decade, but Lindelofs provocations run more prestigiously political.
World-building like that suggests a progressive vision of tomorrow, today.
Tobacco is against the law, and sugars next.
In the premiere, Angela walks by a guy holding up a placard: THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT.
You sense the game Lindelof is playing here.
But you sense a certain strain of high-octane wokeness getting satirized, too.
That 21-trigger warning is a sincere flare forWatchmenviewers.
What Im getting at is, I dont know if theres a sensibility that will walk away entirely unoffended.
That traffic stop scene is a conflagration of left-right hashtags, a Black Blue life mattering.
The storytellings not safe; there is a lynching motif.
Nelson is a magnetic presence, even though you barely see his face in the early episodes.
This is a hotblooded tale with room for big performances.
No ones bigger than Irons, who gets to play with the loopiest material.
I have no clue what newcomers will think about the Ozymandias Squid thing.
(Hell, evenreadersonly really had to deal with the Squid for a few memorable pages.)
The show is generally good at nudging toward its source material without requiring a masters degree in Alan Moore.
Still, there are bouts of undigested canon.
Jean Smart is a playful presence as Laurie, a smirky mask-hating bull in everybody elsesmy-costume-is-my-pathologychina shop.
And yet, I dont think the show really connects TV-Laurie to the source character.
Making her an FBI agent seems too easy, somehow.
(Angelas secret hideout is a bakery but the busy plot doesnt let her bake anything.)
Credit Lindelof and his collaborators for telling a hyperbolic story shaded with good humor and sweet emotion.
LikeLost, its a sci-fi tale shrouded in theory-provoking mystery.
(Squids arent the only things falling out of the sky.)
Its dangerous, and invigorating.
Like the proverbial Space Squid, it blew my mind.A-
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