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After the revelation of “ The Dark Knight ,” here is “Watchmen,” another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie. It’s a compelling visceral film — sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it’s not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope.

That world is America in 1985, with Richard Nixon in the White House and many other strange details, although this America occupies a parallel universe in which superheroes and masked warriors operate. The film confronts a paradox that was always there in comic books: The heroes are only human. They can be in only one place at a time (with a possible exception to be noted later). Although a superhero is able to handle one dangerous situation, the world has countless dangerous situations, and the super resources are stretched too thin. Faced with law enforcement anarchy, Nixon has outlawed superhero activity, quite possibly a reasonable action. Now the murder of the enigmatic vigilante the Comedian ( Jeffrey Dean Morgan ) has brought the Watchmen together again. Who might be the next to die?

Dr. Manhattan ( Billy Crudup ), the only one with superpowers in the literal sense, lives outside ordinary time and space, the forces of the universe seeming to coil beneath his skin. Ozymandias ( Matthew Goode ) is the world’s smartest man. The Nite Owl ( Patrick Wilson ) is a man isolated from life by his mastery of technology. Rorshach ( Jackie Earle Haley ) is a man who finds meaning in patterns that may only exist in his mind. And Silk Spectre II ( Malin Akerman ) lives with one of the most familiar human challenges, living up to her parents, in this case the original Silk Spectre ( Carla Gugino ). Dr. Manhattan is both her lover and a distant father figure living in a world of his own.

These characters are garbed in traditional comic book wardrobes — capes, boots, gloves, belts, masks, props, anything to make them one of a kind. Rorshach’s cloth mask, with its endlessly shifting inkblots, is one of the most intriguing superhero masks ever, always in constant motion, like a mood ring of the id. Dr. Manhattan is contained in a towering, muscular, naked blue body; he was affected by one of those obligatory secret experiments gone wild. Never mind the details; what matters is that he possibly exists at a quantum level, at which particles seem exempt from the usual limitations of space and time. If it seems unlikely that quantum materials could assemble into a tangible physical body, not to worry. Everything is made of quantum particles, after all. There’s a lot we don’t know about them, including how they constitute Dr. Manhattan, so the movie is vague about his precise reality. I was going to say Silk Spectre II has no complaints, but actually she does.

The mystery of the Comedian’s death seems associated with a plot to destroy the world. The first step in the plot may be to annihilate the Watchmen, who are All That Stand Between, etc. It is hard to see how anyone would benefit from the utter destruction of the planet, but remember that in 1985 there was a nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that threatened exactly that. Remember “Better Dead Than Red”? There were indeed cold warriors who preferred to be dead rather than red, reminding me of David Merrick ’s statement, “It’s not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose.”

In a cosmic sense it doesn’t really matter who pushed the Comedian through the window. In a cosmic sense, nothing really matters, but best not meditate on that too much. The Watchmen and their special gifts are all the better able to see how powerless they really are, and although all but Dr. Manhattan are human and back the home team, their powers are not limitless. Dr. Manhattan, existing outside time and space, is understandably remote from the fate of our tiny planet, although perhaps he still harbors some old emotions.

Those kinds of quandaries engage all the Watchmen, and are presented in a film experience of often fearsome beauty. It might seem improbable to take seriously a naked blue man, complete with discreet genitalia, but Billy Crudup brings a solemn detachment to Dr. Manhattan that is curiously affecting. Does he remember how it felt to be human? No, but hum a few bars. ... Crudup does the voice and the body language, which is transformed by software into a figure of considerable presence.

“Watchmen” focuses on the contradiction shared by most superheroes: They cannot live ordinary lives but are fated to help mankind. That they do this with trademarked names and appliances goes back to their origins in Greece, where Zeus had his thunderbolts, Hades his three-headed dog, and Hermes his winged feet. Could Zeus run fast? Did Hermes have a dog? No.

That level of symbolism is coiling away beneath all superheroes. What appeals with Batman is his humanity; despite his skills, he is not supernormal. “Watchmen” brings surprising conviction to these characters as flawed and minor gods, with Dr. Manhattan possessing access to godhead on a plane that detaches him from our daily concerns — indeed, from days themselves. In the film’s most spectacular scene, he is exiled to Mars, and in utter isolation reimagines himself as a human, and conjures (or discovers? I’m not sure) an incredible city seemingly made of crystal and mathematical concepts. This is his equivalent to 40 days in the desert, and he returns as a savior.

The film is rich enough to be seen more than once. I plan to see it again, this time on IMAX, and will have more to say about it. I’m not sure I understood all the nuances and implications, but I am sure I had a powerful experience. It’s not as entertaining as “The Dark Knight,” but like the “Matrix” films, LOTR and “The Dark Knight,” it’s going to inspire fevered analysis. I don’t want to see it twice for that reason, however, but mostly just to have the experience again.

Ebert's blog entry on "Watchmen" and the quantum existence of Dr. Manhattan:

http://tinyurl.com/aby7cp

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

Watchmen (2009)

Rated R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language

162 minutes

Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman

Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias

Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre

Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II

Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake/Comedian

Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl

Matt Frewer as Moloch the Mystic

Gary Houston as John McLaughlin

• David Hayter

Directed by

• Zack Snyder

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Watchmen (2009)

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The Movie Review: 'Watchmen'

I first read Alan Moore's seminal comic Watchmen when it was published in graphic-novel form in 1987, and it was a minor revelation. The audacity of Moore's grim story of costumed heroes plagued by psychosis and alcoholism and lust, teetering on the brink between justice-seeking and sadism, was exceeded only by the style and imagination with which he (and illustrator Dave Gibbons) told it: the meticulous, nine-panel format that lent structure to the madness, the Philip K. Dickian comic-within-a-comic read by a peripheral character, the lengthy excerpts from (fictional) autobiographies and journal articles scattered throughout. It's not without reason that Watchmen was long believed to be unfilmable.

Opinions will vary on whether self-announced "visionary" director Zack Snyder's $100 million-plus adaptation is proof or refutation of this belief, though count me among those who judge it the former. Watchmen is in some ways an impressive movie, but it is a drearily over-literal one, the sober, well-financed retelling of a hallucinatory fever dream.

Snyder's film opens sharply, tweaking the sequence of Moore's original. It's 1985, and Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), aging but still athlete-fit, watches television in his luxurious New York apartment. As a perfume ad set to Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" comes on, a mysterious figure bursts in and begins taking Blake apart, hurling him into walls and furniture and, finally, through his wide plate glass window. It's a long way down to the street.

We soon learn that before his terminal fall Blake was a former crime-fighter named The Comedian, who'd more recently worked as a kind of paramilitary thug for the U.S. government. (With one notable exception, Moore's "heroes" are not super-powered.) To get us up to speed, Snyder offers a historical montage on the evolution of costumed crusaders from the 1940s on, the early glories and tragic endings: a Mothman who went cuckoo, a lesbian avenger murdered with her lover, the eventual outlawing of the mask-and-tights set. It's a nice sequence, although, in contrast to the sly appropriation of "Unforgettable," it's set ham-fistedly to "The Times They Are A'Changin." (From here on out, the film rarely misses a chance to have a musical cue tell us something we already know: "The Sounds of Silence" accompanies a funeral procession, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" plays as one character wrangles with the captains of global industry, "Flight of the Valkyries"--!--blares during a Vietnam battle scene.)

No one much bothers over the death of The Comedian, except for Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a fellow vigilante and borderline sociopath who worries it may be the work of a "mask-killer" and sets himself the twin tasks of solving the crime and warning other former heroes of the threat: nice guy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), vinyl vixen Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), corporate titan Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), and the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a former physicist whom a nuclear accident rendered blue, bald, and (frequently) butt-naked.

These varied vigilantes bicker, bully, rehash the (mostly woeful) past, and, by fits, re-inspire one another to action. Snyder is loyal to his text to a fault, and such alterations as he dares--the tighter, more telegraphic opening, the replacement of a climax involving a giant, interdimensional psychic squid with something rather less goofy--are frequently improvements. But there are problems both with the tale, which was an awful lot more subversive 20 years ago than it is today, and the telling, which in contrast to Moore's radical experimentation is disappointingly staid and straightforward, imprisoned by its own legend.

In the 1980s, Watchmen was the definition of envelope-pushing, a bleak, violent subversion of a relatively innocent genre. But over the subsequent two decades the pop-cultural envelope has been stretched outward more or less continuously, by Tarantino and "24," by the dark inquiries of David Lynch and Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz, by the torture porn of Saw s and Hostel s, and on and on. The superhero genre in particular has been tweaked and twisted and turned inside-out in recent years: It's not merely The Dark Knight that has stolen some of Watchmen 's thunder, but to lesser degrees Hancock and The Incredibles and even Ang Lee's Hulk . At this point, we half-expect anyone in tights and cape to turn out to be a dangerous lunatic.

The absurdities and uglinesses of Moore's original work are also more evident because Snyder's film is incapable of the narrative gymnastics of the comic. Though he retains Moore's fractured chronology and frequent flashbacks--to The Comedian's attempted rape of Silk Spectre's superheroic mother, to the accident in which (apologies to "Arrested Development") Dr. Manhattan blue himself--he does not undertake the more literary ventures that gave the original such unexpected texture: the "Tale of the Black Freighter" mirror narrative, the "found" book excerpts, etc. As a result, Watchmen , which ought to highlight the strengths of its source material, too often reveals the weaknesses instead.

Snyder's cast runs the full spectrum from awful to awesome. Malin Akerman--who in 27 Dresses and the Farrelly remake of The Heartbreak Kid was cast in the role of beautiful woman who's nonetheless so irritating you desperately want her to go away--is no more tolerable in the (intended) sympathetic role of Silk Spectre. As Ozymandias, the "smartest man in the world," Matthew Goode has the wan whiff of puberty to him. Crudup, the most accomplished actor of the bunch, is largely wasted as Manhattan, his wry demeanor buried under so much CGI that the most memorable aspect of his portrayal is probably the glowing blue manhood with which Snyder equips him. Patrick Wilson is solid as paunchy sweetheart Nite Owl, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is rather good as The "with heroes like you, who needs villains?" Comedian.

But the film's best performance by far is Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach. For the bulk of the movie, his face hidden by a mask on which ink-blot-like shapes form and re-form, he rasps with a cold fury that would have Christian Bale's Dark Knight cowering in the Batcave lavatory. But it is when he is unmasked and incarcerated for a time that the character--and the film--come most fully to life. Though the diminutive Haley is about the size of one of Mickey Rourke's steroidal biceps, he may offer the most compelling portrait of violent retribution since the latter's turn in Sin City . One of Snyder's shrewdest alterations was to take perhaps the best line in the comic, which appears in a psychiatrist's report, and place it back in Rorschach's mouth, a warning to his fellow prison inmates, many of whom he put there and all of whom want him dead: "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me."

Such appeals to adolescent testosterone take one only so far, however, and not nearly the length of Watchmen 's 163-minute running time. Bit by bit, the convoluted plotting, sensualized ultraviolence, excruciating musical choices (did I mention an extended sex scene set to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"?), and line readings in which Malin Akerman wrestles with the concept of character like a bunny with an anaconda overwhelm everything in their path. By the time a giant ball of energy is dropping down on Times Square toward the film's conclusion you may worry that New Year's 2010 is already upon us. Grant Snyder this much, though: It took balls to have the last line in his opus spoken by a major character be "Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends."

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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Movie Review: Watchmen (2009)

• MovieGoddess
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• 2 responses
• --> March 21, 2009

In Zack Snyder’s brilliant film version of Watchmen , it isn’t business as usual for a group of rag-tag costumed do-gooders living, working, and laying low in the alternate world of a Nixon-era 1985, a time when masked crime fighters have been outlawed. In much the same way as Chris Nolan did for Batman in the The Dark Knight , Snyder (who also directed 300 ) moves the crime fighters away from the cartoon landscape – the natural habitat of super heroes – and puts them into a neo-noirish, angst ridden world poised at the breaking point.

No comic book action film, however lofty, would be complete without all the requisite accouterments. Fans of Watchmen and similar work will be happy to know that Synder serves up pulse-pounding, intricately choreographed action sequences and astonishing visual and special effects. His set design is that of a world in trouble, deep in the shadows — part 80’s corporate greed, part 40’s film noir; a Bladerunner world reinvented.

Yet at the heart of the movie are such philosophical concerns as, is humanity worth saving? Is the price for peace too high if to achieve it, one must kill millions to save billions? Saving the world and watching over humanity is the job of the Watchmen — as Adrien Veidt says, “We can do so much more. We can save this world . . . with the right leadership.” But in the tradition of great drama/tragedy, there’s always a “rub”:

The Comedian: . . . It’s like you always say, we’re society’s only protection. Night Owl II: From what? The Comedian: You kidding me? From themselves.

It’s the ultimate irony. The big joke.

News anchors report that the United States and the Soviet Union are dancing perilously close to the edge of the abyss (nuclear war), which is represented symbolically by The Doomsday Clock, now set at 5 minutes to midnight. That same night, an intruder bursts into the home of former crime fighter The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and kills him. Does one thing have anything to do with the other? Investigating his death is the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) who concludes that someone is out to discredit and kill off costumed superheroes. But why? Rorschach seeks out his old comrades to help him unravel the mystery surrounding the The Comedian’s murder — Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson), and Adrien Veidt (Matthew Goode). What they discover together turns out to be a profound betrayal of all their beliefs.

Snyder establishes a tone that is appropriately dark, somber and brooding, though one could wish for a little light — and humor — to penetrate the veil and relieve some of the darkness as the has-been heroes dig for answers. Watchmen isn’t light comic action entertainment. It is heavy all the way around, from its tone, to the visuals, and through the thematic content.

Watchmen also presents a different take on super heroes — here we get to see them functioning in the real world. These are not squeaky clean individuals or other-worldly beings — they are ordinary people with extraordinary powers. They are susceptible to the gamut of human failings — alcoholism, abuse, insanity — and that vulnerability is what makes them so fascinating.

This immersion also helps the 162 minute running time pass effortlessly. Scenes may at first seem a little disjointed or confusing, but Synder’s technique to expand on the narrative through flashbacks to create the back story not only answer the questions that inevitably arise (and in a way is consistent with detective work) but also fleshes out the characters into complex, individuals rather than one-dimensional cartoon cut-outs. In particular, I applaud Synder’s imaginatively conceived expository title sequence which provides history as well as context.

The cast is undeniably attractive, but merely competent in the acting department with the exception of Jackie Earle Haley who shines in his role as the cynical, tortured, yet strangely likeable Rorschach. He’s a bit grubby without the mellifluous ink-blot mask, but he breathes life into a character who comes off as creepy and nihilistic, but in truth possesses great character and compassion for a society he claims he despises.

Watchmen is an exceptional achievement for Snyder who pushes beyond the boundaries of established comic book action films, surprising us with a film both real and thought-provoking, energetic yet measured, edgy yet profound — the thinking person’s comic action film.

I've been a fanatical movie buff since I was a little girl, thanks to my parents who encouraged my brother and I to watch anything and everything we wanted, even the stuff deemed inappropriate for minors. I work, write, and reside in San Francisco the city where I was born and bred.

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'Movie Review: Watchmen (2009)' have 2 comments

March 26, 2009 @ 6:54 am Cristine Alvero

I love this movie! And by the way great review, I really appreciate it!

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August 1, 2009 @ 11:27 pm Michelle

I didn’t like this movie at all. It was distasteful. Just another movie trying to cover up poor acting and directing with sex and nudity. It should have been named “hang out with my wang out”. Some things are best left to our imagination. Another book ruined on film.

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Watchmen Review

01 Jan 2013

162 minutes

Recently quizzed on his expectations for the movie adaptation of his hallowed graphic novel Watchmen, Alan Moore — shaman, philosopher, citizen of Northampton and visionary comic-book auteur — was heard to sigh. “Do we need any more shitty films in this world?” he grumbled not-unreasonably. After all, a muddled V For Vendetta and the gigantic snafu that was The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen had led him to finally cut all ties (including financial) with the movie world. Let them do what they will, just don’t involve me. He concluded his diatribe with the simple remonstration that Watchmen, his masterwork, was “inherently unfilmable”.

Which is not exactly encouraging for a director attempting their dream project. But Zack Snyder, hot from his stylised-if-juvenile adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, is a determined man. Even if Moore had turned his back, Snyder was one of the faithful, Watchmen his Bible, and would treat it with a care unprecedented in the annals of Hollywood screw-ups. Every sinew of directorial effort has been bent on proving the author wrong.

Equal parts celebration, parody and exotic dissembling of an entire industry, the novel is dizzy with storytelling devices: not just comic-strips, but biographical chapters, diaries, newspaper reports, poetry quotations, medical files and a warped, ultra-violent story-within-a-story called Tales Of The Black Freighter (sensibly siphoned off by Snyder into an accompanying animated DVD release). It was less the Citizen Kane of graphic novels than the Ulysses — a vortex of astonishing ideas that could take you years to fully compute. Stick that into two hours of family entertainment then, Zack…

In this gloomy, alternative Nixonian America, an outcast superhero has been tossed out of his apartment window. Still, The Comedian, former member of the disbanded Watchmen, has some ugly secrets. Rorschach, a paranoid sleuth whose ink-blot mask eerily ebbs and flows with his moods, can smell conspiracy, but his fellow ex-Watchmen are hard to convince. Ultra-brain Ozymandias is locked away in his ivory tower solving the energy crisis, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are fretting over freakish pasts, while Dr. Manhattan — the only genuine superhero, having been blasted in a freak atomic accident — has become detached from human emotion, capable of knowing his future and travelling to Mars on a whim.

It’s a whodunnit, although what exactly has been done is hard to say. It’s an action movie heavy on dialogue, although the movie styles up the punch-ups into slow-mo montages slickly edited to effective if anomalous tunes — a Snyder predilection that can lean towards the wearily hip. It’s an origin story, or rather five origin stories flashbacking through time. It’s a bleak, rangy tale of a planet beset with disorder, a parable about power, and a superhero soap that shuttles between multiple story arcs that almost divides the film into comic-book cells.

Greater reputations than Snyder’s have wrestled with the beast to no avail. Terry Gilliam, no stranger to whirling structures and otherworldliness, couldn’t figure it out. Paul Greengrass, no stranger to political subtexts and propulsive action, was abandoned by a sceptical studio. Amid the mud-hurling of the recent court case, the script was accused of being an “unintelligible piece of shit”.

That Snyder has gotten a version to the screen at all is a triumph. He has found a way — although this is 160 minutes of a dense, geek-orientated blockbuster for grown-ups. Inevitably, but hardly catastrophically, it fails to truly capture the cascade of ideas and bracing cynicism of Moore’s writing. Yet there is a challenging, visually stunning and memorable movie here, moored halfway towards achieving the impossible.

It will also inevitably be judged from two angles: what it means for those that have read the comic-book, and those who will enter the cinema unequipped, say, with the history of the Minutemen, predecessors of the Watchmen, or the nature of Bubastis, Ozymandias’ genetically mutated lynx. Snyder nearly manages a film for both, but errs to the former. While necessarily filleting down the vast story to something palatable for human bladders, he is slavish to the original text. In his desire to encompass the novel’s strands, storylines and their payoffs are short-changed, leaving the film emotionally subdued, more an intellectual mystery than natural thriller.

And there is no compromising for the junior dollar: arms are snapped, heads hatcheted, and Viet-Cong splattered like flies by Dr. Manhattan, while Silk Spectre keeps her kinky boots on during mid-flight coitus. The entire atmosphere, dunking the cleaner lines of the novel into a pungently vivid, rain-sloshed superhero noir, lacquered in blood stains and midnight shadows, is superbly realised, a true world-unto-itself far more stimulating than Iron Man’s Windowlened sparkle or even The Dark Knight’s shimmering, Michael Mann-ish nightscapes.

In boldly keeping the book’s (then contemporary) 1985 setting fraught with Cold War paranoia — the plot teeters on the brink of nuclear war — the film becomes a less urgent period-piece. The political spine is now cute, as America taunts the Soviets as it has Dr. Manhattan as the ultimate deterrent. A hairless blue man with it all hanging out, he comes care of a mo-capped Billy Crudup that’s about 70 per cent successful — much better in close-up than the distracting mid-shots dominated by his blurry-blue CG cock.

Of all the Watchmen, it is Rorschach and Nite Owl who are most successful. Jackie Earle Haley finds the leery, psychopathic heartbeart of the faceless Bogart, and you half-wish Snyder might have stuck with Rorschach as protagonist rather than spreading the net so wide. No doubt the purists would have wailed. Patrick Wilson, too, is just right as the tortured Owl, a hero bereft in his own identity. It is Mathew Goode as oddball Ozymandias, and Malin Ackerman as Silk Spectre who botch line-readings, ill-at-ease in latex that is part suit and part joke.

Which should tell you Snyder has caught the novel’s provocative mindset. Fundamentally, Moore was asking how a universe of costumed crime fighters might actually work. A quest borrowed by Nolan for his Batman rethink. Here, though, there is dark satire: Batman (now Nite Owl) can’t get it up, impotent without his suit on; Wonder Woman (now Silk Spectre) carries the mountain of her mother’s guilt (a previous Silk Spectre marooned in old age); Superman (now Dr. Manhattan) has taken on the unreachable guise of a god. Best of all, there is Philip Marlowe (now Rorschach), with his do-or-die morality and Taxi Driver voiceover, the most hideously human of the bunch. Holed up in the clink, the inmates try to dispose of the despised crime-fighter. Unmasked and dead-eyed, Earle Haley turns to his foe and, shortly before dousing him in boiling chip fat, chillingly delivers Moore’s deathly magic: “None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with… ME!” And he’s the hero.

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'Watchmen' Review: HBO's Take On The Iconic Comic Is Destined To Be Your New TV Obsession

How do you solve a problem like  Watchmen ? The graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons remains iconic, but it's already been the subject of a questionable film adaptation that attempted to copy the panels and splash pages shot for shot, angle for angle, color for color, and yet failed to genuinely encapsulate what made the book so special.

Rather than attempt to re-adapt the seemingly unadaptable,  Damon Lindelof has instead opted for something altogether different: a sequel series. This could've backfired, yet Lindelof and his team have done the impossible – they've captured the superhero deconstruction elements that stood out in Moore and Gibbons' work while also expanding on their world-building. The end result is destined to be one of the year's most compelling shows.

It's been nearly 35 years since Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandius ( and  the World's Smartest Man), dropped a gargantuan "alien" squid onto Manhattan, killing millions and bringing about world peace in the process. Welcome to 2019 – a 2019 different than our own, yet eerily familiar. Smartphones and the Internet are unheard of, Robert Redford has been President of the United States for the last 30 years, guns are on lockdown, and superheroes are outlawed. But that doesn't mean the streets are free of masked crusaders.

In this world, it's the law enforcement that dons masks and costumes. Uniformed patrol cops cover their faces in bright yellow masks while detectives adopt full-blown superhero-like personas. Three years ago, a white supremacist group known as The Seventh Kalvary – a group fond of wearing masks that emulate the long-dead vigilante Rorschach –  staged a coordinated attack dubbed the White Night. The masked right-wing group descended upon 40 different police households in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with deadly results. The action leads to a full-blown resignation from almost all the surviving cops in Tulsa, and left a law enforcement vacuum.

The solution: Oklahoma Senator Keane ( James Wolk ) passed a law that enabled all cops to wear masks and hide their identities. Now it's against the rules for anyone to even admit they're a cop – they hide in the shadow and adopt secret identities. On the surface, this  might make sense. But as one character in  Watchmen says, "You know how you can tell the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante? Me, neither." A masked cop living in secret might be safer, but they're also freer to bend the law.

Watchmen unpacks all of this information gradually, and, most impressive of all, organically. There's no sudden rush of exposition; no on-screen title cards to fill in the blanks. Instead, show creator and writer Damon Lindelof and his team have managed to overload  Watchmen with intense world-building that comes naturally. This is no easy feat – just look at the dozens upon dozens of movies that attempt the same thing, with terrible results. Even if the narrative and the mysteries  Watchmen has to offer up ended up disappointing, the world-building elements alone might be enough to knock the series into the stratosphere.

Thankfully, the plotting is just as intriguing. The Seventh Kalvary has been dormant, and thought dead, for the last three years – but now they're suddenly back, and they're killing again. A murder of a high ranking police official catches the attention of  Detective Angela Abar ( Regina King ), who has adopted the persona of Sister Night – an ass-kicker in a sleek nun-like outfit. Angela tells everyone around her that she's retired from law enforcement to open a bakery, but it's all a front. Whenever trouble arises, she stalks off to her Batcave-like bakery to slip into her costume.

The more Angela looks into her case, the more the world of  Watchmen opens up, introducing us to its characters and its ever-growing world. There's the oddball detective known a Looking Glass ( Tim Blake Nelson ), who wears a mirrored mask and has a knack for giving people the creeps. A strange 100-year-old man ( Louis Gossett Jr. ) in a wheelchair seems to be keeping plenty of secrets. A lordly upper-class figure ( Jeremy Irons ) stalks about a vast castle, aided by a pair of slave-like servants ( Tom Mison and  Sara Vickers ). A trillionaire ( Hong Chau ) is in the midst of buying up land for a project. And former superhero Silk Specter, aka Laurie Blake ( Jean Smart ), who has become an FBI agent specializing in catching masked vigilantes. If that seems like a lot to take in, just wait until you see the show itself – we're only scratching the surface here.

A series so packed with colorful characters and an extensive fictional universe might strike one as overwhelming, but  Watchmen  remains surprisingly breezy. The pacing of the series is impeccable, never rushing or cramming the details in, with the on-screen events bolstered by a moody, thumping, haunting score courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross .

King is the anchor of the series, and she brings a raw, ferocious energy to the part – when she breaks down in rage at one point, we can  feel the pain echoing in her hoarse cries. But the character is also playful to an extent, and it's a treat to watch King's character unpacking an unfolding, confusing mystery. The cast around King is equally stellar, with Don Johnson stealing many of his scenes as Angela's Chief and Smart bringing a wonderfully droll, sarcastic sense of humor to her been there-done that character.

Watchmen deals with weighty issues – police brutality and racism being at the forefront. But like the other elements of the series, the script attacks these issues in organic ways. There's no preachy messaging here, and indeed, the storyline makes for complex viewing. Angela and her fellow cops are going up against white supremacists – characters we're in no way meant to sympathize with. Yet at the same time, the notion of law enforcement hiding their identities is a terrifying one, rife with corrupt possibilities. There are no easy answers here, just difficult questions that burn their way into your brain. The biggest question is one that harkens back to the original graphic novel, and rings out truer than ever these days: "Who watches the watchmen?"

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‘Watchmen’ Review: A Dazzling Reinvention of a Landmark Comic

• By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen landed on comic book fans in the fall of 1986 with the force of a thunderbolt, if not that of a giant psychic interdimensional squid. (You kind of had to be there .) The series was, among other things, a murder mystery, an alternate history commenting on that particular era of Cold War pre-apocalyptic paranoia, an extremely R-rated superhero story, and, oh yeah, a ruthless deconstruction of superhero comic books. Across 12 issues, Moore and Gibbons dismantled, harshly examined, then garishly reassembled every structural and thematic device the medium had been using all the way back to the birth of Batman and Superman. What kind of person, the book asked, would put on colorful tights and a mask to go beat people up in public? How different would our world be if people with godlike powers existed? Watchmen interrogated everything, down to the way individual panels were traditionally laid out. It was a comic book for adults, not just because of the sex, the language, and the excessively graphic violence, but because of its themes and the way it questioned the very nature and purpose of stories like it.

Watchmen , along with Frank Miller’s Batman story The Dark Knight Returns , utterly transformed the image and aspirations of the comics industry. They birthed the perpetual cycle of “Zap! Bam! POW! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” headlines, and inspired other creators to tackle more mature content. But most of Watchmen ‘s creative descendants only skimmed along the surface of what made it so radical. They adopted the sex, the violence, and the sense of self-loathing about superheroes themselves, in a desperate cry to be taken seriously, but lacked Moore and Gibbons’ deeper ambitions. At the same time, Watchmen itself began to gather a reputation as unfilmable, with directors as varied as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass trying and failing to make a movie out of it. Eventually, Zack Snyder succeeded with his 2009 movie version. Snyder’s take has its moments (particularly an opening credits montage inserting superheroes into iconic American images across four decades), but in faithfully adapting the comic’s pulpy plot, it missed all the conceptual daring that was the important part. Characters who were meant to illustrate the absurd arrested development of superheroics were instead badasses having fights with bullet-time effects. It was like someone proving they could trace over a Picasso painting, without understanding what the original artist was doing with his strange rendering of the human anatomy.

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Even the Snyder film’s most ardent supporters admitted the source material would have been better served as a premium cable series, which would have room for both the story and its many weird flourishes, and for the larger questions the comic raised. A decade after Snyder, Watchmen has finally landed at the screen home where it probably always belonged, HBO, but in an unexpected fashion. Damon Lindelof , the inspired, divisive mind behind Lost and The Leftovers — two shows with a generous helping of Watchmen DNA already — is in charge. Rather than simply retell the comic story at greater length, Lindelof has taken an enormous swing. He’s sidestepped adaptation altogether and created a sequel set in the same universe as the comic, that is faithful to the events of that story but only features a few characters from it. The setting — present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma — is completely different. So is the show’s central theme of white supremacy.

Where Snyder’s focus on following the letter of the law with Watchmen caused him to utterly miss the spirit of the thing, Lindelof’s disruptive approach comes far closer than you might expect at first, given how many departures he’s taken from where the comic book left off. Not all of it works, but it’s a fascinating — and frequently thrilling — attempt to rebottle some of the same lightning that Moore and Gibbons unleashed back in the Eighties.

Lindelof’s take isn’t a deconstruction of superhero shows, nor of TV dramas in general, in the way that the comic picked apart other comics. Television has been deconstructing itself plenty in the post- Sopranos era, and even some comic book dramas have done it, whether through the psychedelic imagery of Legion or the self-aware goofiness of Legends of Tomorrow . But he’s successfully taken the comic’s larger sociological questions and extrapolated them out to the terrifying world we live in now. In Ronald Reagan’s America, for instance, the thing that seemed on the verge of destroying us was nuclear war, and much of the comic’s story was fueled by fear of everyone dying under a mushroom cloud. In Donald Trump’s America, the existential threat is white nationalist extremism — and, beyond that, more casual but pervasive forms of racism — which Lindelof turns into the Seventh Kalvary, a KKK-style movement whose members wear masks inspired by Watchmen vigilante Rorschach. The Kalvary’s terrorist actions in turn have forced police officers to assume costumed identities, like Regina King’s Tulsa cop Angela Abar, who patrols the streets in a fetish nun outfit, calling herself Sister Night.

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Cops dressing like superheroes is an inversion of a plot device from the comics, where masked vigilantes were legally banned in the Seventies. But it also feels unnervingly applicable to our world, where events like Botham Jean’s murder (and its violent aftermath) can create the impression — particularly in minority communities — that the police are already a team of untouchable vigilantes. That Angela herself is black is a complication the series examines early and often, with Lindelof again taking advantage of the fiery brilliance of King, who was briefly part of The Leftovers ensemble.

The story deftly toggles between our own history and the alternative one Moore and Gibbons crafted. We open decades before any event from the comic, with a horrifying depiction of the real-life 1921 massacre in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, which at the time was known, to the displeasure of local Klan members, as “Black Wall Street.” And then we land in a version of 2019 where Robert Redford has been president for a quarter century, and where Angela and her boss, Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) are at open war with the Seventh Kalvary. The series takes its time explaining how our past is connected to its present, particularly via an inscrutable man in a wheelchair played by Louis Gossett Jr. It’s also in no hurry to reveal how figures from the comic book — including Jean Smart as an older, hard-bitten version of Laurie Blake, who once fought crime as the scantily-clad Silk Spectre; and Jeremy Irons savoring every bit of scenery he can chew as an enigmatic exile who sure seems to be smartest man in the world Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt — figure into this new story. There are parts that may be impenetrable to viewers who don’t know the original story (or even the movie’s slightly modified version of it), but the eventual explanations — and particularly the link from the Greenwood prologue to the present day — prove incredibly effective.

Along the way, Lindelof and his collaborators (including fellow Leftovers alum Nicole Kassell as lead director) continue to ask how the world would be different — both better and worse — if it had superheroes in it. The series as a whole isn’t a takedown of Peak TV, but there’s a great running gag involving show-within-the-show American Hero Story , a stylized anthology that’s Zack Snyder crossbred with Ryan Murphy. And through the use of this more cynical Laurie Blake — played with delightful and very necessary wry humor at all times by the great Jean Smart — the show nimbly continues the work of analyzing why someone would put on a mask to get what they want, whether they’re a would-be hero or a racist villain.

At times, Watchmen falls into some of the same traps that could make the first season of Leftovers so difficult to get through. The tone can be dour, the show’s visual palette frequently more muted than the material seems to demand. (The hypnotic synth score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is more up to the challenge than many of the photography choices are.) But then we’ll cut to whatever ridiculousness Jeremy Irons is up to, or alien squid will rain out of the sky (again, you kind of have to be there), and Watchmen will come to dazzling life in the same jaw-dropping manner in which Lindelof’s two previous series so often did. The sixth episode, a largely black-and-white trip back to New York in the late Thirties, unlocks the show’s secrets and themes so smartly and audaciously, it left me feeling the same visceral, disbelieving thrill I haven’t experienced since Kevin Garvey sang karaoke to escape The Leftovers ‘ afterlife, if not since we found out that Lost ‘s John Locke was in a wheelchair before the plane crash. It’s the best kind of magic trick, where you can’t stop wondering how they pulled it off, even as you keep applauding the end result.

Alan Moore has famously disavowed any filmed adaptations of his work, and anyone else working with Watchmen in particular. It’s hard to imagine him even watching this show, let alone approving of all the deviations between his work and Lindelof’s. But I’d like to imagine an alternate version of history where Moore hasn’t been burned too often in the past by others playing with his toys. In that timeline, he sits down to watch what Lindelof has done with his signature work. He’s baffled at first by how little resemblance it bares to what he and Gibbons once did. But gradually, he lets the tiniest of smiles peek out from under his signature Old Testament beard as he sees how much this Watchmen can feel like his Watchmen , even if they look nothing alike.

Watchmen debuts October 20th on HBO. I’ve seen six of the nine episodes.

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‘Watchmen’ Review: Damon Lindelof’s Spectacular HBO Series Is Equal Parts Insightful and Exciting

Ben travers.

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Much of what “ Watchmen ” is about — and Damon Lindelof ‘s substantial adaptation of Alan Moore’s sprawling graphic novel is about quite a lot — can be summed up in a joke. Well, it’s not really a joke, but the cunning and cutting Jean Smart still sells it that way.

“You know how you can tell the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?” Smart, as FBI Agent Laurie Blake, asks.

No-bullshit Tulsa police detective Angela Abar, played by Regina King, answers plainly, as expected: “No.”

“Me either,” Laurie says — and that’s the end of the joke.

Masks, identities, and the murky, muddled truth they form are central themes of “Watchmen.” If the cops and criminals wear masks, how do you tell them apart? Who’s the hero and who’s the villain? Who, in other words, do you trust? Looking beyond the veils people share with the world, “Watchmen” finds fundamental truths about an America divided by a lack of faith in itself, its people, and its institutions. The series’ scope is astonishing given its subject matter, and even more so given its relentless entertainment value. Through six episodes, “Watchmen” has already provided a bounty of intelligent theories to study and debate, but it’s designed to be one helluva good time, as well.

And it is. While it’s best to go into “Watchmen” sans spoilers, a bit of framing can be helpful in getting a grip on its hefty world-building. Everything that happened in Moore’s graphic novel is canon — the creation of Dr. Manhattan, winning the Vietnam War, even the Minutemen are all part of the past for everyone in the series. Certain events will be referenced, plenty of easter eggs are well-placed, and some established characters (like Laurie) play key roles in the new story, but you do not need to know the original comic by heart to appreciate this fresh creation from Lindelof and fellow executive producers Tom Spezialy (“The Leftovers”), Stephen Williams (who also directs), and Nicole Kassell (who helms the first two episodes).

The immaculate pilot, directed by Kassell with powerful fixed framings (reminiscent of the comic’s panels) and rich contrasting colors, sets up a conflict between local law enforcement and domestic terrorists. The Tulsa P.D. have negotiated a truce, of sorts, with a masked group known as the Seventh Kavalry — until an officer-involved shooting reopens old wounds.

In examining their conflict, “Watchmen” starts upending expectations and provoking conversation. Many of the targeted police officers, led by King’s character, are black. The Kalvary, who wear the mask of a former hero named Rorschach, is made up of white supremacists. This juxtaposition of a powerful black police force and a powerless white minority is purposeful, though not in obvious ways from the outset. The choice grows more effective and affecting as the series rolls on, as does much of the show’s more enigmatic scenes, set-ups, and subjects.

Lindelof has always enjoyed throwing his audience for a loop. Whether it’s an unexpected flashback, the sudden introduction of a new character, or starting a season by chronicling a pregnant cavewoman giving birth, the “Lost” and “Leftovers” showrunner tosses curveballs for the same reason a pitcher does: to keep the batter/viewer on their toes. But he also trusts his audience as much as he respects them. Seemingly random scenes always serve a purpose, if not multiple purposes, even if they can be overwhelming. At one point, a character says, “There’s a vast and insidious conspiracy at play, here in Tulsa. If I told you about it, your head would explode, so I have to give it to you in pieces” — that’s how it can feel watching “Watchmen”; as though your brain might snap from information overload. (Thank goodness HBO is still on a weekly rollout.)

Still, it’s balanced — if you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s easy to appreciate the endless easy pleasures offered by this exceptionally cool adaptation. Big, loud, and intense action scenes are captured in giant fields, where the choreography of each movement is played out like a badass ballet. The same goes for the convincing hand-to-hand fights, which make the most of an able cast. Speaking of, King is nothing short of amazing — yes, she’s got an Oscar and three Emmys, but she puts even more range on display in a turn that effortlessly pivots between invulnerable and vulnerable. Jeremy Irons is having a ball as Probably Who You Think He Is, while Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, and Don Johnson each make you fall for them all over again. And yes, the costumes are so damn good-looking Halloween 2019 is going to be overloaded with cops in yellow masks.

When Smart tells that joke, she isn’t wearing a mask. She’s with the FBI, so she doesn’t have to. In “Watchmen’s” alternate reality, only local police are required to hide their identity. Anyone else who dons a disguise is considered a threat, in part because of Laurie’s past actions. Back in the ’80s, Laurie ran around as Silk Spectre, one of the many “heroes” who were either outlawed or privatized for government use after the public grew suspicious of their intentions, powers, and purpose.

Now in HBO’s “Watchmen,” Laurie is staring at a new form of costumed justice, and that figure is staring right back. The past and present are looking at one another, and neither likes what they see. “Watchmen” asks how we move forward from there; how we evolve, how we coexist, how we trust one another again. There’s no easy answer, but you’ll be shocked at how rewarding the search can be while watching this “Watchmen.”

“Watchmen” premieres Sunday, October 20 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

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Movie Reviews

'coup de chance' is a typical woody allen film — with one appalling final detail.

Justin Chang

Niels Schneider and Lou de Laâge star in Coup de Chance. GRAVIER PRODUCTIONS hide caption

Niels Schneider and Lou de Laâge star in Coup de Chance.

Once upon a time, it might have been strange to think that the arrival of a new Woody Allen movie in theaters would qualify as some kind of event. But much has changed, especially over the past decade, with renewed focus on allegations that Allen sexually abused his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow , when she was 7 years old — accusations that the director has long denied. Amazon Studios, which had been distributing Allen's movies, cut ties with him in 2018. His two most recent movies, the critically panned A Rainy Day in New York and Rifkin's Festival, were barely shown in the U.S.

And so it came as something of a surprise when news broke weeks ago that Allen's new movie, the romantic drama-thriller Coup de Chance , would be released in American theaters. The decision probably has something to do with the movie's strong reception last fall at the Venice International Film Festival, where more than one critic called it Allen's best film in years.

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That may not be saying much, given how weak his output has been since Blue Jasmine 11 years ago. But there is indeed an assurance and a vitality to Coup de Chance that hasn't been evident in the director's work in some time. That's partly due to the change of scenery, as Allen's difficulty securing American talent and financing has led him to the more receptive climes of Europe. While he's set movies in France before, this is his first feature shot entirely in French with French actors. It may have been done out of necessity, but it lends a patina of freshness to an otherwise familiar Allen story of guilt, suspicion and inconvenient desire.

It begins with a random reunion on the streets of Paris. Fanny, played by Lou de Laâge, works at an auction house nearby; Alain, played by Niels Schneider, is a writer. (Even if his name weren't Alain, it would be pretty clear that he's the Allen avatar in this story.)

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This is the first time Fanny and Alain have seen each other since they were high-school classmates in New York years ago, during which time, Alain confesses, he had an intense crush on Fanny. There's an immediate spark between them, but alas, Fanny is now married to a wealthy businessman, Jean, played by Melvil Poupaud.

Before long, Fanny and Alain are having a full-blown affair, taking long lunch breaks in Alain's tiny apartment, which is homier and more appealing to Fanny than the spacious Parisian residence she shares with Jean. They also have a beautiful country house where she and Jean go for regular weekend getaways.

Jean often invites friends along to go hunting in the woods, and even before the rifles come out, it's clear that this romantic triangle is destined to end in violence. Many moviegoers will recognize the elements from films like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point : an adulterous romance, a premeditated murder and a darkly cynical consideration of the role that luck plays in human affairs. At one point, Jean notes that he doesn't believe in luck at all — which sounds like an echo of the nihilism that has long been at the heart of Woody Allen's work.

Nothing about Coup de Chance is terribly surprising, in other words. It's a decently executed version of a movie Allen has made many times before, enlivened by Vittorio Storaro's elegant if overly burnished-looking cinematography. As you'd expect, there's a lot of jazz and a lot of loftily repetitive dialogue, the effect of which is somewhat neutralized because the actors are speaking French. They all give crisp, engaged performances, especially Valérie Lemercier as Fanny's shrewd mother, who begins to suspect that Jean is not as trustworthy as he appears.

As the story unravels, one appalling detail sticks out. In a few scenes, Jean is shown playing with a large model train set — and as others have pointed out, it seems to evoke a key detail, also involving a train set, from Dylan Farrow's testimony. Could Allen be referencing his own off-screen scandals, and to what purpose? Perhaps, suspecting that he might be done with the movies at long last, as he's hinted in interviews, he wanted to thumb his nose at his detractors with a provocative parting shot. Or maybe it's just a reminder of something that, for better or worse, has always been true about Woody Allen: For all the many, many characters he's introduced us to over the decades, his truest protagonist and subject has always been himself.

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‘The First Omen’ Review: The Days Before Damien

A prequel to the original franchise, this debut feature from Arkasha Stevenson is a thrilling mash-up of horror tropes that gives the story new life.

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By Brandon Yu

If the “Omen” franchise left us with memorable tropes — the boy Antichrist, lurking among us; those dreaded three repeated numbers — the content of the movies themselves did little else. The original horror trilogy, kicked off by “The Omen” in 1976 , never had the sticking power of other classics in popular consciousness, and a 2006 revamp came and went. What could another attempt, this time a prequel to a middling franchise, really offer?

In Arkasha Stevenson’s hands, it can take us on a pretty fun ride. “The First Omen” is about everything before Damien (a.k.a. the Antichrist incarnate), following Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American nun-to-be that is sent to an orphanage in 1971 Rome, where social mores are shifting and things quickly begin to get weird. It’s a period piece that Stevenson’s debut feature plumbs effectively, giving the story both scale and some nice compositional punches, while setting the stage for an often delightfully pulpy narrative (the Catholic Church is not so holy after all) to how the Antichrist came to be.

The film revels in mashing up familiar genres: the monster movie, body horror and the Gothic church thriller. But it injects a revitalizing juice into the franchise — smartly edited and well paced, with a good cinematic eye.

And most important, Free is a game partner to Stevenson’s vision. She naturally embodies the seemingly delicate innocence of young Margaret, a softness that, of course, must eventually harden against darker forces. Eventually she is taken over, her body jolting and writhing to something beyond her control in an arresting scene that gives the oft-discussed subway sequence from Andrzej Zulawski’s “Possession” a run for its money. It’s another familiar nod with just enough of its own delirium.

The First Omen Rated R for violent content, grisly images, and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.

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The First Omen Review

You have been warned: the prequel is great..

More moviegoers in 2024 may know The Omen by reputation than from firsthand experience. It’s not that the 1976 horror classic about a little boy who turns out to be the antichrist isn’t a great movie, but despite spawning multiple sequels and revival attempts , it just hasn’t had the same pop-culture resonance or staying power as, say, its contemporary The Exorcist . So the prospect of an in-canon prequel to the original film feels a bit strange – and yet that prequel, The First Omen, works, thanks to a clear directorial vision, a strong central performance, and some gnarly visuals.

This is one hell of a calling card (pun intended) for director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson, who makes her feature debut chronicling the harrowing ordeal that befalls young American novitiate Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) in a Roman orphanage. The film goes all in on its dark storyline and imagery as Margaret forges a connection with the teenage Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a particularly troubled orphan who’s prone to violence, reminding her newfound protector of her own turbulent childhood. As ominous signs and strange behavior swirl around Carlita, Stevenson and cinematographer Aaron Morton provide a technical flair that evokes the cinema of The First Omen’s 1970s period setting. But they don’t try to mimic that style from start to finish – though obliged to lay the groundwork for 50 years of movies and TV shows about the sinister Damien Thorn, Stevenson’s movie is, thankfully, allowed to have its own identity.

The First Omen Gallery

It’s evident in the standout sequence where Margaret joins her roommate, Luz (Maria Caballero), for a night of rather un-nun-like behavior. Stevenson and Morton stylishly capture Margaret’s buzzed point of view and state of mind in the midst of a busy Italian club whose atmosphere grows menacing and unsettling. It's a welcome escalation in a story that begins sluggishly but picks up momentum in its second half. The First Omen can also be a rough watch at points, delving even deeper into motifs and analogies of bodily autonomy than the recently released, similarly themed Immaculate . Yet Stevenson’s depiction of a woman’s body being controlled and invaded by others doesn’t feel exploitative as much as it is forthright about the horror of Margaret and Carlita’s predicament.

There are also fun and effective jump scares and memorable, suitably creepy moments throughout, plus one shot so graphic that Stevenson says it nearly led to an NC-17 rating. (You’ll know it when you see it – it garnered incredulous applause both times I’ve seen the movie.) The First Omen leans into the franchise’s proto- Final Destination legacy: People who get too close to stopping Damien in these movies tend to meet intricately grisly ends – either by “accident” or their own hand – and that remains true even before the spooky little kid is born. This string of often grimly funny and macabre deaths kicks off in the very first scene, which deftly sets up a big, dangerous object that will quickly turn lethal. It’s great that The First Omen keeps this tradition alive, even if its callback to The Omen’s iconic “It’s all for you” sequence feels a bit forced. (Though, since it’s a prequel, does that make it a call-forward?)

What's your favorite religious horror movie?

The cast are all very good, but this is an especially terrific spotlight for Free. The Game of Thrones and Servant alum is excellent here, in a role that asks quite a lot of her. Margaret is a woman of faith, doing her best to lead a pious existence despite some curiosity about a more conventional path in life. The events of The First Omen put her through the wringer, both emotionally and physically, and Free skillfully conveys all of these challenges and how Margaret changes to meet them. Veteran actors Sônia Braga and Bill Nighy (the latter popping in and out of the movie at random) exude expected gravitas as church leaders, and Caballero brings the right edgy-yet-likable vibe to Luz, who is determined to push the boundaries of novitiate behavior. Sorace manages to combine the unsettling yet vulnerable traits that help Margaret connect with Carlita while Ralph Ineson also brings some great frenetic energy as Father Brennan, who has quite a bit of important information for Margaret about what is occurring and why.

Brennan is also notable as the one major character connection to the original Omen, where Patrick Troughton played the role of the priest who desperately tries to warn Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn that, whoops, he’d adopted the antichrist. In that regard, the end of The First Omen is both amusing and also slightly eye-roll inducing. It looks to both seamlessly lead into the original’s events and set up further entries in the franchise, all without contradicting the earlier films. There’s definitely some silliness at play in how these elements are intertwined, but there’s also something entertaining in the realization that of course Disney and 20th Century Studios wouldn’t go through all the trouble of reviving The Omen without plans for making more of them.

The First Omen manages to serve as a well made prequel as well as an unsettling and creepy horror film in its own right. It takes awhile to get going, and the very end bends backwards pretty far to create setup for potential follow-ups, but the brunt of the movie is very strong, with lead Nell Tiger Free and director Arkasha Stevenson both cementing themselves as stars on the rise.

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