I stan Alan Moore, and Lindelof’s Watchmen looks amazing.
Seriously...the last thing we need in 2019 is someone to try and do a pale imitation of the original on screen, losing all of Moore/Gibbons/Higgins’ painstakingly structured detail. It’s a comic for a reason. It was explosive, angry, original and strange...but its slow absorption into the cultural canon has turned it into just another sacred text to be regurgitated. Sure, a straight adaptation of the book might be watchable, but it could never be more than a cute tribute act.
Who would choose that, when you could instead have the idea advanced daringly into the present day in the timeliest way possible - look at all those cops wearing those anonymising yellow masks, look at Regina King’s character placing the sheriff’s star onto her hooded hero costume, and think about what that might mean in light of every time police have been in American news for the past decade - by the writer of The Leftovers, a show that also brilliantly evolved from a book while slowly becoming some of the boldest and most powerful TV of the decade?
If we want to talk about honouring Moore’s work, I can think of no better way - nor better atonement for the inherent injustice of DC cashing in on him - than to tell a new story equally as experimental, contemporary, weird, and fiercely critical of the superhero fantasy (which has arguably ballooned to more dangerous levels than ever before) as the source.
But of course it helps that it’s set in the world of the book, meaning the squid is canon and absolutely will be referenced. People are going to hate it. I reckon I’m going to fucking love it.
