Watchmen (television miniseries 2019)
Watchmen. Damon Lindelof, creator. Various directors and writers; John Blair (producer 9 episodes), Karen Wacker (producer, 9 episodes).[1] USA: DC Comics, Home Box Office (HBO), Paramount Television, et al., 2019. (see IMDb for details).[2] Series Production Design: Kristian Milsted (8 episodes), David Lee (7 episodes), Mark Worthington (1 episode).
Spinoff ultimately from the Watchmen graphic novel, relevant here in large part for Jeremy Iron's Adrian Veidt character in "Little Fear of Lightning" (episode 5, 17 November 2019), where we see Veidt scooping up what appear to be fetuses from a lagoon (?) in a scene from a kind of Virgilian Hades, putting the "fetuses" into what is functionally a large, vertical mechanical/electronic womb — where they are born (so to speak) in full adult size after enduring what sounds like pain and suffering as another pair of Phillips[3] and Crookshanks,[4] a very humanoid butler and maid: clones, apparently, but in the tradition of the android robots of R. U. R. Veidt gets a large number of Mr. Phillips-es and Ms. Crookshanks-es to help him into a modified early-model deep-diving suit, put him in a variation on the sling of a trebuchet, and shoot him through some sort of portal that transports him to a moon of Jupiter. On another plot line, some cinematic-shots back on Earth show basketballs thrown into portals and disappearing, and later falling out of nowhere-that-we see, which comically plays on Vivian Sobchack's idea that a central move of SF film is defamiliarizing a mundane setting by putting into something very non-mundane: such as giant ants, or Godzilla. The falling basketballs defamiliarize with something as mundane as a basketball doing something so non-mundane as just dropping in (literally). Veidt may be isolated on some sort of prison planet, but it looks like an aristocratic English country estate — appropriate for the aristocratic-looking Jeremy Irons — and Veidt in the diving suit looks like a down-on-his-luck medieval knight in badly-made armor, juxtaposed in frame with the clones, trebuchet, and some sort of ultra-high-tech trans-dimensional portal.[5]]
Most of the Watchmen miniseries is up to other, more important themes on race and gender and heroism, but sequences with a visual satura — hodgepodge — of technologies make the series also must-see TV for many users of this wiki. In the final episode, "See How They Fly" (1.9, aired 15 December 2019), among other images of containment inside high-tech mechanisms of sorts, note the variation on Deus ex machina of a god (Dr. Manhattan) in a cage subjected to beam devices, being drained of energy and divinity. Also note shots of Adrian Veidt using a matter transporter to rain down baby squids — both fresh and (climactically) frozen, in an image of the very rapid superimposition of the highly technological upon the cephalopodal.
Finale reviewed by Angelica Jade Bastién, New York Vulture on-line, 15 December 2019;[6] Ben Travers, IndieWire on-line, 15 December 2019.[7]
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WATCHMEN (2009) film:[8] not really relevant, but of some interest for imagery of clocks, especially with Jon Osterman, the watchmaker's son, and later with him as Doctor/Dr. Manhattan; note also "Doomsday Clock" of (in our reality) the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.[9]
RDE, finishing, 31May21, 6Jun21, 20Jun21
