Last year, when showrunner Damon Lindelof posted a letter to Instagram about his upcoming Watchmen series for HBO, he classified it as a “remix.” On the one hand, this was good news for fans who were trepidatious about seeing the greatest comic book story of all time receive another direct sequel or adaptation. On the other hand, remixes already dominate the dance floor in Hollywood. When creators and critics use that word now, it either feels like industry code for a thinly disguised remake (amid all the other official remakes that are currently flooding the market), or it feels like a pejorative term for the repackaged greatest hits of a beloved IP.
By way of an example, this very week, we’ve got a new Terminator movie hitting theaters, which reviewers have likened to The Force Awakens of the franchise. However, if the first two episodes are any indication, that’s not what Lindelof’s Watchmen remix is. Instead, what it looks to be is a fascinating re-contextualization: a show that sets us down on familiar ground but updates it and makes it feel different enough that its echoes of Watchmen and other past superhero tales lay submerged within a fresh story.
Running Out of Ice, But Doing Fine on Eggs
The first episode’s title, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” is a line from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, but in its own way, it also recalls the heat-wave metaphor in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. That movie celebrated its thirtieth anniversary this summer—the day after the Comic-Con trailer for Watchmen dropped. As much as the world has changed in the last three decades, it feels like the movie’s radio warnings of a heat wave with “no end in sight” have proven oracular, not only in terms of race relations, but in the overall tenor of U.S. political rhetoric.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted in January 2017 (a week after the Inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th U.S. President), the real-life Doomsday Clock has reached a point now where it is actually closer to midnight than in the Watchmen comic. For the last two years, it’s held at two minutes to midnight.
The Boy Who Would Be Hooded Justice?
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