Watchmen (2019)

I love alternate-history stories. Movies, books, shows. I don’t care. As long as they can tell an interesting, engaging tale, I’m 100% in.
These are fiction, obviously, but are far more intense than simply making up an imaginary drug, a la “Limitless” (2011).
A good alternate-reality world takes one item from history, turns it on its head, and shows us what the long-term effects of that are. 
While “Inglorious Basterds” (2009) showed us Quentin Tarantino’s fetish version of Nazi killing and revised death of Hitler, it didn’t show us the long-term effects of that change.

In the “Watchmen” universe, a man-turned-deity helped the U.S. win the Vietnam war, which turned it into the 51st state. The Watergate Scandal never broke, the Cold War fizzled away quietly when that deity caused everyone’s nukes to disappear all at once, and Reagan was never elected.
This show took that a step further: smartphones didn’t evolve into existence, nor did modern consumer computers, 9/11 never happened, actor Robert Redford was elected president, and the Tulsa Race Riots of the 1920s were a modern-day political issue that the federal government actually tried to fix... sorta. 

Angela Abar (Regina King) was a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a world where the police were required to wear bright yellow face masks to hide their identities; a knee-jerk policy change thanks to an anti-police-targeted attack by an extremist KKK off-shoot called The Seventh Kavalry (yes, with a ‘k’).

Initially I thought the yellow masks were a requirement because yellow would be easily visible to passers by, helpfully clarifying that the masked man was a cop, not some creep.
While that could be the in-universe answer for them, I realized as I watched that the bright shade of yellow used for the masks was used in many other scenes, for important items, like an officer’s billy club, to entirely unimportant items, like the harness that connected a horse to a carriage for a dude living in a fancy British manor. I’m sure someone who paid much more attention than me could explain why each specific thing was yellow, but I’m not that person and I didn’t pay that much attention. 
What I can say was that it was an outstanding highlighting tool to make visuals pop in scenes that would have otherwise been relatively monochromatic.
And, to note: the particular shade of yellow used was the same shade as the title of the comic books, so I can at least pin-point the source.

So. Why did I pick another show to review for my movie website?
Because it’s been years since a show caught me in the pilot episode and held onto me so thoroughly through the end credits of the season finale.
Part of what caught my attention was the alternate history mentioned above. Nothing about their reality was slammed in our faces. It was referenced repeatedly that Vietnam was the 51st state, but no one said anything stupid like “Hey, isn’t it weird that we have an extra state now?!” 
And the lack of smartphones and computers was just never discussed, because how could it be? How would characters reference devices that simply didn’t exist? That’d be like if I complained about not having a GlarbFlux-8 to review movies with.

While winning one of our proxy-wars would have been nice, the event that really charged this show was the Tulsa Race Riots.
This was something that happened in our reality. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, Tulsa was a vibrant, successful hub of African American culture in the heartland. High-end restaurants, theaters, a market place dubbed ‘Black Wallstreet,’ etc. 
Then, thanks to a horrible dose of racism, the poor whites of the area decided that  black people having money was unacceptable and they rioted, killing and looting throughout the city. 
Even more unfortunate was how the government reacted: it didn’t.
Nothing from the local, state, or federal levels. It was viewed through the disgusting lens of “Well, we’re white, and the people who got screwed were black, so it looks like there’s not much we can do about it. Oh well.”
And that was that.
I didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Riots until about a year ago when I heard about it in a history podcast. Megan said she’d heard about it in school. Regardless, that’s a huge blind spot in our cultural heritage. That’s something that needs to be taught, to remind Americans - especially those of us who are ‘privileged’ - that minorities have often received the short end of the stick in our short country history. 
Other examples: The Trail of Tears (against Native Americans), concentration camps (against Japanese Americans), segregation (against anyone who wasn’t white), and slavery, obviously.

In Watchmen’s America, President Redford started a program of reparations to pay back money to the genetic descendants of those African Americans who lost their fortunes and livelihoods to the riots. The slur “Redfordations” became fighting words, specifically used by racist characters to exude their disdain.

As racists like to bemoan: “It’s hard to be a white man in America.”
This was a slogan that one of the main villains said repeatedly and with a smile. It’s also something I’ve seen an unfortunate number of times online, as various internet users have screen-capped other users’ gross tirades, usually focusing on how ‘white people are losing their privileges because someone else is getting something!’
Reminder: rights and privileges are not pie; just because someone else is getting more doesn’t mean you’re getting less.

You might have read the above few paragraphs wondering why there was so much political talk in my show review.
Because, ultimately, that’s what the series was about. Angela Abar was an African American cop in a city that was still feeling the echoes of a horrifying, racially motivated nightmare that happened almost 100 years prior. Frankly, the fact that there were costumed vigilantes was very much a subplot to the racial tensions.

But the vigilantes were there, which means they’re worth talking about too:

Adrain Veidt (Jeremy Irons) was the perfect narcissist. His story was told over the course of approximately four years, with each passing year making it more and more clear just how self-absorbed he was and how thoroughly he demanded that the entire universe revolve around him. For the first seven episodes, he just seemed like a charismatic, murderous inventor, intent on finding new and exciting ways to kill his staff. His importance to the story came about in episode eight, where he transitioned into the main plot line and everything he’d been doing for four years clicked into place perfectly.
He was also a horrible, heartless person. At one point he caused the death of a minor character; while that character lay dying and speaking their final words, Adrian said, approximately, ‘yeah yeah, that’s nice’ and left them.

Masked Justice (Steven Norfleet) was revealed in an episode-long flashback as the first superhero in America, coming to the scene in 1940s NYC. I can’t talk about him too much, as his backstory is a huge linchpin for the plot, so I’ll let that unravel for you when you watch it.
His character arc and development were outstanding.

Dr. Manhattan (actor’s name withheld to avoid spoilers), the reason the U.S. won the Vietnam War and the nukes disappeared, played a surprisingly small role. Considering the roughly nine-hour runtime of the season, he was in maybe 90 minutes of it; during the rest of the show he was mostly just referenced as a god-entity that existed as a fact of life.

The Seventh Kavalry were all racists, plain and simple. 
They wore “Rorschach Masks” (white ski masks with Rorschach ink-blots on them), because they claimed they were somehow influenced by the Rorschach, a character from the movie/comics who I remember as being a particularly aggressive vigilante, not a murderous racist.

Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) was one of four detectives who was allowed to wear an entirely non-standard uniform (read: superhero costume) when on the job. The show never did explain why this quartet got such an allowance, but it didn’t dwell on it either. Looking Glass had a particularly cool ability to tell if someone was lying when he talked to them. He couldn’t read minds, but he could call bullshit if someone wasn’t telling the truth. 

This show was not told chronologically, in a way that was very familiar to me having watched both seasons of “WestWorld.”
The four days that Angela lived through were punctuated by flashbacks, flash forwards, flash sideways, and various other forms of storytelling that required the audience to be sitting and actively watching. 
At one point I tried to do the dishes and listen while Megan watched. Definitely couldn’t do it. Not only were there back-to-back scenes with the same characters in different time frames, but some fairly important scenes were entirely visual with the only audio being a piece of classical music, so if you weren’t watching, you’d have no way of knowing what was happening.

Also like “WestWorld,” this show trickle-fed you details to massive, plot-defining riddles. They all got answered at one point or another, but there were countless times when we’d pause the show, rattle off a theory, then wait to see if we were right. 
For the most part, we nailed it, but only a few minutes before the show would have revealed the right answer anyway. I can’t claim to be a particularly good mystery solver, but it was nice to constantly feel ever so slightly ahead of the show as we watched.

The audio mixing for this show was top-notch. There was music that fantastically emphasized the scenes it was playing over, and there were a handful of sound effects that we very quickly learned to recognize as “shit’s about to go down” stuff. 
Adrian repeatedly got classical music to accompany his amoral anti-hero antics, and Dr. Manhattan got a beautiful rendition of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for his extended on-screen introduction.

The graphics were, unsurprisingly, beautiful. If you’ve seen “Game of Thrones” or “WestWorld” or any other HBO show from the last decade, this shouldn’t surprise you in the slightest. Colors and contrasts popped, scenes were easy to watch and decipher, visual tricks for the title cards varied with every episode, and even the show’s title was warped and modified to fit whatever the opening scene was. 

There were two snazzy Easter eggs that I was able to spot that “related” to our world. The one I liked the most was that someone talked about a movie that was made by Steven Spielberg, released in 1993, and was filmed entirely in black and white, save for one girl in a red jacket. While this is clearly “Schindler’s List” to us, it was a completely separate movie in this alt-America.

I said in my review for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” that I hated movies that relied on other media to complete the story.
While “Watchmen” the show was helped by having seen “Watchmen” the movie, it wasn’t a necessity. 
Furthermore, the show followed the movie chronologically; at no point will Megan and I have to bounce back and forth between the silver screen and the cable box to keep up with the entire series (assuming it gets picked up for season 2). It made the transition from one medium to the next and that’s it.

The finale of the show wrapped up in such a way that HBO could easily roll into a second season if they wanted to, but also closed up the loose ends and could leave it at one if so desired.
This earned a hard-R rating for gratuitous violence some mild nudity, cursing, and some deeply uncomfortable racism, including slurs that are definitely not okay to say.
It also earned a 5-Claw rating for being absolutely stellar. I was glued to the screen the entire time and Megan and I had to remind each other that we needed to sleep instead of binging the next episode on multiple nights.
As soon as the last credits began to roll, Megan looked at me and asked “So, are you going to review it?”
This is the only thing she’s ever asked me to review.