Tag Archives: Watchmen

Watchmen Ticks All its Pieces into Place in “See How They Fly”

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Andrew Bloom

When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed plenty of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and whether it would be able to catch all of them. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, showrunner Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame) is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. His new series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about powerful institutions and those marginalized by them, and it threw in one eyebrow-raising plot point after another. But to answer all of the former and resolve all of the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest [person] in the world to do in a satisfying way.

And yet, somehow, “See How They Fly” does it.

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Watchmen and the Inscrutability of Love and Creation in “A God Walks into Abar”

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Andrew Bloom

The beauty of science fiction is that, in the right hands, it can tell stories that other genres can’t. Strip away the limitations of fact; tap into the power of imagination, and you can conjure scenes and situations the shabby metes and bounds of the real world couldn’t sustain. In the best hands, the absence of those limitations — the combination of fiction and abstraction — allows the author and their audience to reach truths that even the most poignant, most trenchant slice of reality cannot possibly match.

So when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons imagined a god, a living embodiment of quantum entanglement, they used him to explore the bitter ironies of causality. They traced the lines of cause and effect, jumbled up in one man’s life, to find the knotted ends of detachment and transcendence and omniscience turned predestination. Jon Osterman had, like others before him, come unstuck in time. And his creators, like others before them, used that temporal hash to shine a light on the human condition in ways that linear storytelling wouldn’t allow for.

Jeff Jensen & Damon Lindelof use the same approach to tell a story about love and creation, and about how each produces a yearning for something destined to leave us.

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HBO’s Watchmen Watches Over Trump’s America

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Andrew Bloom


More than 30 years after the globe-shaping events of the original Watchmen comic, the ripple effects can still be felt. Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt is in seclusion somewhere far away and presumed dead. A group of Rorschach-imitating, conspiracy-touting white supremicists threaten the peace and the police at every turn. And the law enforcement officers of Tulsa, Oklahoma have donned capes, cowls, and masks in response, with some even assuming the secret identities that can come with them.

Continue reading at Consequence of Sound →

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Batman v. Superman Is a Well-Intentioned, But Deeply-Flawed Mess of a Film

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Andrew Bloom


CAUTION: This review contains major spoilers for Batman v. Superman.

There are some good ideas and good intentions behind Batman v. Superman. If you want to make a superhero film, there are worse comic books to crib from than Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and the Doomsday arc. If you’re trying to create a film that owns its four-color roots while also aiming to make some kind of grand statement, there are worse ideas than trying to examine the social and political repercussions of god-like aliens coming to Earth. If you want to add your own bit of shading to a set of time-honored icons, there are worse ways to do it than showing each of them struggling with the legacies of their parents.

But trying to do this all at once requires a deft hand. Trying to do it all with the added requirements of the expected big-budget action sequences, the need to launch a new cinematic universe, and an effort to correct for the perceived missteps of a prior film, would take a miracle-worker. If the balance of all of these disparate elements isn’t just right, instead of the intended depth and complexity, you get a well-meaning, but ultimately incoherent muddle. That’s what the cumbersomely titled Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice amounts to — a boldly ambitious, hopelessly flawed, overextended mess of a film.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6: Deconstruction, Self-Destruction, and the Real World

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Andrew Bloom


“Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?”
– Rorschach, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen

One of my theater teachers gave me some advice before I performed a particularly bizarre piece on stage. He said, “Make the character’s reactions real. No matter how wild the situation or how crazy the setting, you have to make the audience believe that this is how someone would react.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the fantastical world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sure, creator Joss Whedon lays down some important ground rules for his universe, but at its heart, it’s still a fantasy world where the chosen few do battle with demons and monsters and bloodsuckers in a quiet California suburb. Through five seasons of Buffy, Whedon & Co. populated this world. They gave it life as a place where the mystical reigns above the everyday. Then, in Season 6 they decided to turn it completely on its head.

They changed course and put their focus on how the folks battling supernatural threats handle the fallout of that fight in their everyday lives. The mythic elements of Buffy–the monsters, the spells, the magic–were all still there, but they took a backseat to giving the audience one, big, season-long reminder — that the story of Buffy Summers is supposed to take place in the real world.
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