![]() Which brings me to King, whose grounded performance, along with Jean Smart’s FBI agent, is the best argument for watching the show. ![]() And the acting is fine all around, and here and there exceptional. (Indeed, the writing in most any given scene is very good.) Both “Watchmen” and “Lost” appeal to me on a sensory level: The production is excellent, the design clever, with an impressive attention to detail and some fun pastiches of old movies and advertisements. Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) begin their relationship. And some of these gambits are elegantly expressed, as in the barroom conversation where Abar and Dr. “Watchmen” is a lot tighter than “Lost” was, though the circular systems have been obviously worked through in advance, where “Lost” was a festival of retconning. It works on some primal level, yet it still feels more manipulative than meaningful to me. (Fans spent an enormous amount of time puzzling the show out, even as, fundamentally, there was no puzzle.) In “Watchmen” it’s clocks and eggs and such, and a narrative that leans heavily on dark secrets and (not always) amazing reveals for its dramatic effects: X is the Y of Z! There’s an effective trickery when it comes to coincidence - they’re always spooky on some level - and “Lost” got a lot of mileage from repeating the same essentially meaningless sequences of numbers all over the damn place. Manhattan?) Yes, “Lost” is what I thought of too, though the apparent randomness of a polar bear on a tropical island was much more interesting than when they got around to an explanation. LLOYD: Lorraine, you steal thoughts from my head. Are there an extra 20 “Watchmen” episodes we don’t know about? Because there’s no way they can assemble all this space junk into a cohesive narrative by Sunday’s finale. Manhattan, and the doc is a god who speaks in time-jamming riddles. What is their purpose? Take Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons): He’s a sadistic genius who creates sycophants in his lab and then tortures them in gruesome ways, but to what end, other than making viewers cringe? There are cars that drop from the sky, a Vietnamese holiday on which folks paints themselves blue in honor of Dr. Squid dropping from the sky is “Lost’s” cabin in the woods. “Watchmen’s” version of the polar bear is an elephant. ![]() Now can we talk about the myriad “Lost” problems here? I’m referring to all the mysteries, inexplicable phenomena and enigmatic figures they introduce then fail to unpack. In “Watchmen,” Jean Smart adds to a string of acclaimed roles in dark series like “Fargo” and “Legion” as no-nonsense FBI Special Agent Laurie Blake.ĪLI: Right, the show wants it both ways - racism is bad, but hey, white supremacists are tired of being stepped on too! Ugh. Television ‘Watchmen’s’ Jean Smart knows you have questions about that sex toy. (I do like the fact that in this world, people get their news from actual print.) The series is built around a a core of vigilante heroes and superheroes, cops who act like vigilantes, and a couple of mad scientists who might as well be called superheroes since they invent impossible things with ease - all of whom seem to be trying to save the world in their cross-purposed way. We’re talking about our America, when it fits, and not our America, when it doesn’t. That the show exists largely on an alternative timeline - certain events, like the Tulsa massacre, are historical fact others, as with an ongoing Robert Redford presidency, might be called historical fun - lets it off the hook to a certain extent, I guess. (Not that you need a point in a comic book movie, other than, you know, “Kapow!”) Still, on the big issues, or what the show seems to suggest might be issues without significantly developing them, it frustrates me - even as, at nearly any given moment, I find it enjoyable to watch it’s a matter of the parts being greater than the sum. There is still the finish to come, so it’s possible that the show’s many threads will tie up into something like a point. ![]() LLOYD: I agree that the show, from which the comic’s creator Alan Moore has disassociated himself, is a muddle, which sets us apart from what seems to be the critical consensus that something great and meaningful is going on here. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |