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'Watchmen' TV Series From Damon Lindelof in the Works at HBO [update: pilot ordered]

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Blader

Member
Discotheque said:
I don't get this season 1 -> season 2 point that's been bandied around a lot lately

Like sure season 2 definitely is better. But it's also very indicative of the tone and melodrama of the first season. So if you didn't like that in leftovers don't bother with the rest

I enjoyed the show overall for sure though. Even made a thread about it (and this was just after the first season haha). But I gotta say I was not happy about the series finale. It propped up a relationship that held no weight to me whatsoever so it just ended up feeling so inert
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I think the tone and melodrama are way more over the top in the first season than the second or third, and it drives many of the characters to the point of just being flat out unlikable. But also just in terms of plotting, Lindelof reorients the show away from aggravating wastes of screen time like the Guilty Remnant or Holy Wayne in S1 into stuff that's actually more interesting to watch.

I mean, I didn't like S1 because of the aggressive melodrama but ended up liking the second and third seasons. It's still melodramatic but Lindelof and co. have a stronger handle on that tone in S2 and 3.
 
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Con_Smith

Banned
People in here acting like Lost wasn't a GOAt before the last season gut punch.

I've taken chances on less (Preacher, American Gods, Walking Dead) so I'll give it a chance. Hate out the gate shit when we can at least expect it to be on par with the movie.
 
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LordOfLore

Banned
For those who don't know what the statue is referencing:
9d939acd98d80efb44844o9uyy.jpg
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Z..

Z..

Member
MarauderShields said:
Why are we pretending Lindelof is awful after the greatness of The Leftovers? Or is this thread just filled with people that don't know it exists?
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Leftovers was decent but quite far from great. Everything else he's ever worked on has ranged from average to abysmal from a writing perspective.

I do not trust anything he is associated with by default.
 
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Inferno313

Banned
Z.. said:
To be fair, the Watchmen movie was pretty damn decent. It had a couple of missteps, sure, but it was far from bad.
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It’s an example of everything wrong with Snyder’s work, honestly. He somehow can manage to nail the imagery, iconography, and details of a work perfectly while simultaneously completely missing the mark on adapating the actual spirit of the work.

There’s so many things in his Watchmen film, such as the use of violence and gore, the changes to the ending, the rapid tonal shifts, etc, that manage to completely betray the hyperliteral adaptation he’s attempting.
 
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broncobuster

Banned
Z.. said:
To be fair, the Watchmen movie was pretty damn decent. It had a couple of missteps, sure, but it was far from bad.
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Honestly, as I better get to know people who work on these movies, and as we see other projects made under similar circumstances (Ghost in the Shell and The Dark Tower this year alone), it's kind of amazing how good the Watchmen movie turned out. Still don't think it was well suited for a movie adaptation and this new TV series is the right way to go. But as is the 2009 adaptation turned a bad idea into a pretty good movie.
 
Z..

Z..

Member
Inferno313 said:
It’s an example of everything wrong with Snyder’s work, honestly. He somehow can manage to nail the imagery, iconography, and details of a work perfectly while simultaneously completely missing the mark on adapating the actual spirit of the work.

There’s so many things in his Watchmen film, such as the use of violence and gore, the changes to the ending, the rapid tonal shifts, etc, that manage to completely betray the hyperliteral adaptation he’s attempting.
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I'm with you on most of your points. Still think the changes to the ending were for the best, though. It worked much better as a film than the squid would've.
 
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Bits N Pieces

Member
Purkake4 said:
Lindelof has ruined everything he's touched that I've seen (LOST, Prometheus, Cowboys & Aliens, World War Z).

Hard pass.
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So you haven't seen The Leftovers then? You wouldn't have typed what you did if you had seen that show.

I've got total faith in Damon to do something spectacular here.
 
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Inferno313

Banned
Z.. said:
I'm with you on most of your points. Still think the changes to the ending were for the best, though. It worked much better as a film than the squid would've.
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I do agree that the squid would’ve been hard to execute, but using Dr. Manhattan instead makes no sense. The entire idea behind the squid was that it was a foreign threat, that could unite the world. Whereas Dr. Manhattan is distinctly an American threat. The logical conclusion here wouldn’t be that the world would unite against Manhattan, but that the rest of the world would unite against America, the opposite of Veidt’s goal.
 
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SpaceWolf

Banned
Inferno313 said:
I do agree that the squid would've been hard to execute, but using Dr. Manhattan instead makes no sense. The entire idea behind the squid was that it was a foreign threat, that could unite the world. Whereas Dr. Manhattan is distinctly an American threat. The logical conclusion here wouldn't be that the world would unite against Manhattan, but that the rest of the world would unite against America, the opposite of Veidt's goal.
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I'm not too sure the world would have perceived Doctor Manhattan as an American threat after the dude essentially wiped out New York along with every other city. I think Manhattan is such a character that the world would have deemed him too alien and detached from humanity to have forged any kind of real ties to America politically, and would subsequently realise the importance of the world banding against him, as of course, Ozy anticipated.

The movie adaptation jettisoning the squid stuff and streamlining Ozymandias' plan so that it would relate directly to Doctor Manhattan made a lot of sense to me, so much so I felt that sense of neatness helped improve that particular plotline in relation to the original comic. It was a change I quite liked, in addition to Dreiberg actually getting to witness to Rorshach's death in the movie version (even though it probably robbed the original scene of its thematic power in relation to the sense of nihilism and hopeless leading up to Rorschach being dispatched so quickly and emotionlessly in the comic).
 
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Shauni

Member
Inferno313 said:
I do agree that the squid would’ve been hard to execute, but using Dr. Manhattan instead makes no sense. The entire idea behind the squid was that it was a foreign threat, that could unite the world. Whereas Dr. Manhattan is distinctly an American threat. The logical conclusion here wouldn’t be that the world would unite against Manhattan, but that the rest of the world would unite against America, the opposite of Veidt’s goal.
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That isn't even the problem to me. The real problem is that the blast hit every major city at once as opposed to just New York with a huge and obvious explosion, as opposed to just New York in the book that was hit with something unknown and unseen until it's investigated. The story paints a picture of a world as on edge as possible, the idea that nukes wouldn't start flying with a massive explosion in major cities is a huge leap of logic. People focus so much on the squid part of the climax, they forget how narratively it makes almost no sense to do an attack of that nature. But that's the problem with that movie as a whole, it really only seems to understand the surface of the story with almost no thought beyond
 
B

Blader

Member
Inferno313 said:
It's an example of everything wrong with Snyder's work, honestly. He somehow can manage to nail the imagery, iconography, and details of a work perfectly while simultaneously completely missing the mark on adapating the actual spirit of the work.

There's so many things in his Watchmen film, such as the use of violence and gore, the changes to the ending, the rapid tonal shifts, etc, that manage to completely betray the hyperliteral adaptation he's attempting.
Click to expand...

While this is all true, I still ended up enjoying the movie for what it is. It's less than the sum of its parts, but I think it's still Snyder's strongest work in spite of all its problems as an adaptation.
 
D

DeathPeak

Member
The Watchmen movie felt more like just a bunch of "cool shots"and direct from page-to-screen framing than an actual movie trying to tell a story. That probably doesn't make sense, but it's the best way I could express how I felt about Snyder's movie.
 
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SpaceWolf

Banned
Say what you like about the movie, but the casting for the most part was staggeringly on point. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach? Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg? Perfection.

The only casting they got wrong was for Ozymandias, which I hope is the one thing the Tv series will really improve upon, especially in relation to his noticeably colder, more robotic characterization as presented in the film.
 
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broncobuster

Banned
I could see them dedicating one whole episode to Tales of the Black Freighter. It it’s at least two seasons, it’d be a wild season premiere.
 
E

Extra Sauce

Member
I can't find the actual article online but there is an old Wizard Magazine roundtable discussion where Lindelof argues that it is inherently impossible to adapt Watchmen because of how intertwined it is with the coming book medium itself.

The cynical reaction to that is "guy has no integrity" but in reality it's a good sign. Unlike Snyder before him, Lindelof understands the challenge ahead of him.
 
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