Watchmen – Design Review

Take a closer look at HBO’s Watchmen through a long form design review.

HBO’s Watchmen delivers a satisfying injection of dark realism into a groundbreaking comic title. Showrunner Damon Lindelof has remixed and expanded upon the alternative world that our vigilante heroes inhabit. It is a bold new redesign of the source material that has been a rating success for HBO and well received by fans and critics alike.

In the original comic by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins, the story tapped into the societal fear of nuclear apocalypse. The 2019 sequel uses racial violence as its ticking clock. We follow a new group of characters as they navigate a world of shadows and masks.

Watchmen is an elegantly constructed and worthy candidate for closer inspection. Breaking down the series from a design perspective generates an understanding of how the series is layered and how a design process can offer insights on the key creative decisions.

Let’s look at how the HBO television series is constructed via a design review.

1. Surface – what does it look like?

Visually, the world that Damon Lindelof and his team have created is layered, thoughtful, and feels like the right match for Watchmen.

Let’s look at the main elements that influence the surface of Watchmen.

Cinematography

This mirror universe functions as a window into a real-world inhabited by real people. Watchmen is polished but not to the point where it prohibits entry. Over-the-top visual effects do not build a credible world if they don’t fit the context of the story. It is about believability, we want it real and we want it lived in.

There are some visually stunning moments in Watchmen. During the episode centered around Wade Tillman (Looking Glass), we see a young man who has just been tricked into undressing in a house of mirrors as a psychic blast hits. It is an alarming image as the mirrors shatter around an incredibly vulnerable figure. This sequence is closed out by an extremely long pull-out shot from the funfair location in Hoboken to the giant squid attack in New York. The entire sequence is infused with a wonderful sense of fun.

There are recurring themes at play in the cinematography. Characters converse while out of focus objects crop into frame bringing a deliberate focus to the actors. There is almost always darkness at the edge of the frame. It gives a feeling that there is something hidden there, just out of focus. It's a creative effect that helps to maintain the spell that Watchmen is attempting to weave.

The standout episode of Watchmen, This Extraordinary Being, is a thrilling blend of creative visual choices and complex storytelling. Angela Abar swallows a bottle of nostalgia pills leading her on a revelatory journey through the backstory of her grandfather. The episode acts as the beating heart for the narrative of Watchmen. We connect one life to another through someone else's nostalgia. Here, black and white cinematography is more than a choice of image treatment for the past, black and white reflects the core narrative of Watchmen. It’s simple, sophisticated and effective.

Color

Add a splash of Comedian Yellow and we are done. Watchmen is synonymous with yellow. The original comic book cover featured the Comedian’s blood-splattered smiley face badge. It is an iconic image. In this new vision, yellow is on show in the masks, uniforms, and weapons of the Tulsa police officers. An agency that has to hide their identities for fear of white supremacists.

The overarching look of Watchmen is the use of a muted color grading where the brighter colors are dulled down. Using a reduced tonal palette is nothing new in the superhero film or television design. The Dark Knight used this to great effect in 2008. It is an easy way to project a darker more serious mood.

Costume Design

Watchmen costume designers, Sharen Davis and Meghan Kasperlik have done an excellent job of creating costumes that accompany the tone of the show. In the comic series, the characters created their own costumes. Red Scare, Pirate Jenny and Panda look DIY, but other costumes venture into the world of bespoke tailoring.

Sister Night (played by the outstanding Regina King) wears a leather nuns habit that flows like a cape. There is the same hint of a cape when Laurie Blake enters the story in the third episode. The camera tracks her entrance from the knee-level giving her the appearance of a superhero on a mission. As the camera pulls back, we see that she is dressed as an office worker. It is a fleeting impression achieved by creative costume design and excellent cinematography working together.

Editing

Watchmen demonstrates some masterful edits that link the dialog and visuals into a cohesive unit. Laurie Blake delivers the punchline of a joke, “the hero goes to hell”, and the next scene starts with a police car driving through a cemetery gate into Tartarus Achers. The score flows menacingly across one scene and into the next. It's a great example of combining dialog, cinematography, and sound. This type of edit may sound like a minor detail, but it is technically impressive to design and pull off consistently.

Set Design

The set design in Watchmen lays out the scenes of a divided world. There is a contrast on show between the refined country home of the Lord versus the post-industrial black-spot where police interrogations take place. Nixonville is amusingly realized as a vast trailer park featuring a giant statue of the former president.

To bring all of these elements together, there needs to be a consistency of vision. The relationships between the different parts need to be structured. This brings us to the next part of our design review.

2. Skeleton: What holds the structure together?

Direction

Like the ticking clock, the direction in Watchmen keeps the pace consistent. The story moves through the different plot markers without laboring the point of one scene or another. We spend a little longer in the scenes with the Lord, but that world seems to exist outside of space and time. We are not sure when or where his house in the countryside is. The more surreal feel to the scenes and slower pace fits with the larger story arc.

Choosing to focus on certain characters backstories for an episode is nothing new for Damon Lindelof. You could make the argument, that his character-focused episodes of Lost or The Leftovers were the highlights of those shows. That pattern follows with Watchmen, episodes featuring Looking Glass, Hooded Justice, and Doctor Manhatten are all outstanding.

Characters

Most of the characters in Watchmen are deliberately ambiguous. We are never really sure where the characters are aligned until their masks have been removed.

Don Johnson’s character, Judd Crawford, is introduced as the man in the white hat. The first episode places him front and center as the dedicated police chief. He pays a visit to the wife of a police officer injured in the line of duty and for all appearances seems like the archetypal good guy cop. A few episodes later, these waters have been muddied.

Sister Night seems to know something that we don’t. She is constantly on guard and interrogative as a cop, while being a caring and even-handed mother with her family. She’s suspicious of outsiders like Agent Blake, who she doesn’t see as an ally.

Watchmen is not afraid to mix up the perceptions of the original characters. If Rorschach is seen as an antihero of the original material, his legacy has been twisted in this constructed world. The Seventh Kavalry, a white supremacist group, view Rorschach as a right-wing martyr. They proudly wear Rorschach masks as they go about their racist todo list.

At first glance Looking Glass seems to be the new Rorschach. His mask looks like Rorschach’s, but that physical similarity is where it ends, his world view is not so black and white. When Looking Glass’s origin story is revealed in the episode ‘Little Fear of Lightning’ we see a character who is still dealing with past trauma. He is obsessive about protecting himself from future psychic blasts. Much like glass, he is fragile.

Soundtrack

The action is combined with a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won an Academy Award for their work on the Social Network. The score adds a certain otherworldliness to the dark visuals as it drifts in and out of scenes. One of the standout tracks is their version of David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’. A song title that perfectly matches where and what Doctor Manhattan is thought to be currently doing by most people on Earth.

Aside from the score, the other music used in the show offers a diverse spread of music from a wide range of genres. There is everything from Mozart to Hall & Oats via Future and Sinatra. This is nothing new for Damon Lindelof, he has demonstrated excellent taste in music through his work in Lost and The Leftovers.

3. Structure: How does the design fit together?

Acting

Across the cast, the acting delivers in hitting the right resonance and level of character awareness. There is an ongoing balance between seriousness and humor that fits with the tone of the Watchmen.

As characters are exposed and forced to reveal their masked identities, the cast brings more of those moments of change to the screen. As the central figure, Angela Abar is at the center of this journey.

Jeremy Irons doesn’t miss a beat as the Lord. He exists in isolation from the other characters for most of the series. At times it borders on the pantomime, but it manages to hold the line and delivers an entertaining collection of scenes.

Tone of Voice

The tone of voice may be the most important factor in adapting any source material. The dark humorous tone that was present in the original comic is evident here. The writing team uses humor to break up the seriousness of the scenes and add a twisted situational awareness to the main characters.

Watchmen also plays with superhero conventions. At one point Agent Blake cuts off a character that is beginning to monologue about an evil plan, “Oh Jesus, please don’t”. In another scene, Lady Trieu replies to Angela’s interpretation of her work, as “it sounds stupid when you say it like that”. Both of these examples are consistently within character and manage to sidestep dialog that may sound ridiculous if it was delivered straight.

Red Scare is a new character who adds comic value to the cast. His costume adds to the joke, a burly Russian guy wearing an old tracksuit, a wife-beater, and a red balaclava. It is so far removed from a superhero costume that you have to laugh.

"White men in masks are heroes, but black men in masks are scary." – Laurie Blake

Balancing humor and a narrative that examines racial violence is never going to be an easy task. It’s a bold choice of direction that requires talented writers and an understanding of the issues. If the balance isn’t right, then the entire series would suffer.

Story

The first scene in the Watchmen is a silent film reel portraying the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi river, a hooded Bass Reeves. Topically, this sets up the series from the outset: we are going to be looking at police power, identity, and race. The clip itself is not long, but there is a moment when you may think that it is not going to end well for Bass Reeves. It is an alarm for the audience, forcing you to view your preconceptions and maybe ask what other biases you are carrying.

Watchmen opens with the Tulsa race riots of 1921. On the first watch, the scenes of the Tulsa race riot are beyond belief. When you think about airplanes dropping firebombs in an American City. It sounds unbelievable. In what world could that happen? It's our history, from our world, as well as in the dark alternate reality of the Watchmen.

Racism is used as a formative force in the journey of these characters. We see Will Reeves's experience scattered throughout the series. Hooded Justice is born out of a toxic past. Sister Night is driven by the events of the White Night.

"You are not supposed to take someone else's nostalgia." – Laurie Blake

It is a simple quote that exposes how individual and dangerous nostalgia can be. Everyone has a different memory of past events, a different sense of what was better and what was worse. It is unique to their perspective and often reinforces a world-view. Nostalgia is akin to Rashomon, where we witness subjective, contradictory and self-serving memories.

We first come across Will Reeves in a movie theatre during the opening scene of the first episode. This scene is bookended by his appearance in a movie theatre towards the end of the last episode. This is a minor detail but it is important in terms of designing a story. His story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When he leaves the cinema the final episode we know who he is, Will Reeves’s journey is defined by Watchmen.

4. Scope: What needs to be included?

Watchmen is based on the concept of what the world might look like if superheroes were real. The concept requires a scope that delves into the practice of world-building.

World-building

HBO is cultivating a reputation for creating series from historical titles. The world of Watchmen is reimagined in the same way that Westworld has been. Watchmen is expanded beyond its original scope by introducing new characters and storylines. Understanding where to expand a world is key to successfully selling it to an audience.

Watchmen places characters in their real world. It’s a world that is constructed around dramatic reality. This realism is contrasted with the use of symbolism and the occasional surreal image. Eggs, clocks, elephants, masks, and god-sized dildos all represent something more.

Watchmen asks the question, where would heroes fit into the culture of our world? In one scene we see a Warhol print in the background that features the Watchmen. It’s conceivable that, if they existed, they would be more famous than Marilyn Monroe or Chairman Mao. They could be posterized by an artist like Andy Warhol. It is this level of detailed examination that distinguishes Watchmen from other created worlds.

We see the same level of follow-through on the cultural context in Vietnam. There is authentic Doctor Manhattan merchandise in the streets as we flashback to a VVD celebration. The wooden masks look like something that would be sold on any street stall in South East Asia.

The internet does not exist in this vision of the Watchmen. Technology has evolved at a slower rate in this world. Pagers, walkie talkies, and answering machines are the latest tech. This helps to set the scene for the ongoing police investigation plotline. During the search for a specific church used by the Seventh Kavalry there is physical police work. We don’t see characters lost in a phone or blankly staring at a screen. Police methodology in Watchmen has more in common with procedural dramas from the nineties than from the current batch of superhero-based television series.

Game of Thrones initially introduced a world that was light on magic, the Watchmen universe is not overrun with superpowers. Doctor Manhattan is the exception. He is more than a vigilante in a mask. He has godlike powers, and he is blue. There is one particular scene in the episode 'A God walks into Abar' that creatively sidesteps showing his appearance. These imaginative choices around Doctor Manhattan integrate him into the world, he is relatable, he is human.

Inventive use of the source material helps to establish the world of the Watchmen. We see snippets of American Hero Story, a television show within a television show about the original Watchmen. It is a fun way to reference the source material without getting bogged down in history.

Another choice that should be highlighted is the way the disaster in New York was handled. The 2009 movie received criticism because it edited the giant alien squid out of the narrative. In this version of Watchmen, we get the squid in a way that fits into the style of the show. It is seen in context to the events in the story, and it works.

In nine episodes, the series builds a world without losing sight of the central narrative, none of the episodes feel like filler. It is tightly bound together thanks to excellent acting, direction, and world-building, and concludes with a real sense of an ending.

5. Strategy: What problem are we trying to solve?

For Watchmen to be successful it needs to be worthy of its source material. That is the goal against which success can be judged. Adapting anything creative from one medium to another always requires change. It is within those choices that there are opportunities.

There are Watchmen fans that will know every character intimately, but the wider audience will be less familiar with the details. For those with a general understanding, this series is a great entry point. Part of the fun is working out how it all fits together.

There are obvious risks involved with developing this material into a series. The 2009 Watchmen movie split opinions with fans and critics. The film was lifeless and didn’t capture the dark humor that infused the comic. This series needed to differentiate itself from that film. The Watchmen we end up with is a world that is refracted. We are viewing the world through a broken mirror, it is dark and unclear. Conceptually, it is a world that feels close to our own.

Beyond the creative goals, there is another strategy at play, the business goals. For HBO, adding more quality content to its stable of programming adds to its reputation for quality. If you think about the strategy at a brand level, HBO is linking its brand with the Watchmen brand. A brand that is popular and respected when it comes to superheroes, it has a certain level of credibility because it was groundbreaking.

The Watchmen brand is unique in many ways. It is big enough that the link to DC Entertainment is not so obvious. It may be a DC property, but it operates in a different realm than Superman or Batman. DC Entertainment’s film and television output are so eclectic that it is hard to pinpoint their content strategy. They appear to let the character, or title, drive the product. That is where Watchmen sits. It is DC property, but it feels independent from the other DC output.

There is one brand strategy point that needs highlighting. Using an established brand, Watchmen, to examine racial violence in America is a striking idea. Few brands would or could commit to that sort of undertaking. You have to commend HBO and the shows creative team for their courage.

An ending

The primary design factors at work in Watchmen are universal to any successful project. Organization, balance, storytelling, and tone of voice. They are all applied in a consistent way that enhances the finished product. The creative team has asked the right questions and created the right framework before launching into production.

By completing a design review you can see which elements and concepts are at play in Watchmen. The balance is right here, Lindelof has created an adaptation that isn’t driven purely by fan service. It taps into our political zeitgeist, warning of the dangers of nostalgia and the power of anonymity through imaginative storytelling.

Assessing the design decisions for a series like Watchmen has to be done by analyzing results. The finished product is layered, thought-provoking, and successfully adapts its source material into a new form. From that perspective, the design choices made have been thoroughly validated.

You can't fault the merits of the idea, in using Watchmen as an allegory to examine racial violence in America. Even if it doesn’t always hit the mark, it reaches for greatness.

When describing the police interrogation pod to Agent Blake, Looking Glass says, “It determines and exposes negative cultural biases to which a subject might not admit”. That is the heart of the message that Watchmen is shooting for. At the height of its powers, it can offer a mirror to examine your own cognitive biases. That is the superpower of Watchmen.

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