Believe it or not, I didn't watch too many T.v. shows this year, so take this next comment with a grain of salt: HBO's Watchmen is one of the most unique television shows I've seen all of 2019. I was not expecting to love Damon Lindelof's sequel to Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name, but the show certainly took me by surprise. If you're not familiar with the comic book property, it's a hard show to pitch to the uninitiated. My only other criticism with the show(aside from its slightly corny ending) is that the show doesn't make a lot of sense to those who have never read the original graphic novel as it is a sequel or continuation of that story. I could go on about the excellent mystery writing of the show, the excellent dialogue and how Lindelof and his crew worked hard to make every character in Watchmen, new and old, feel human and believable. If you are a fan of the graphic novel (and you don't care about Alan Moore's feelings) and were hesitant about seeing the show, I would highly recommend watching it.However, for this post, I did not just want to talk about how excellent HBO's Watchmen is. I wanted to compare the show to the sequel Star Wars trilogy. Never thought you'd see those two franchises in the same sentence, right? What could the space-opera movie serial have in common with a T.V. show on the meditation of power and superheroes? Nostalgia.
Nostalgia-Ultra
Both projects use nostalgia to tell their stories. Both new editions to the franchises are wishes made against the original creators. When George Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney, he was promised that the directors and writers would use some of his ideas for the sequel trilogy. As we later learned in Robert Iger's biography on his career as the chairmen of Disney titled The Ride of Lifetime: Lessons learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, the Disney company scrapped all of Lucas's original ideas for Star Wars episodes 7, 8, and 9 and ultimately left George Lucas betrayed. Alan Moore is stuck in a similar but complicated situation with his creation of Watchmen. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were supposed to obtain the rights to Watchmen years ago when they had created it in 1985. According to Alan Moore, the two had signed a deal with DC comics that two years after the Watchmen mini-series was complete, they would obtain the rights back to the Watchmen characters and universe as there would no longer be any Watchmen material to be published or used by the company. However, DC Comics continued to publish new editions of the Watchmen graphic novel just so they can keep the rights to Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore's characters. At some point, DC comics even offered Alan Moore to write a Watchmen follow-up, but Alan Moore was so upset from not obtaining the rights back to his characters that he not only refused to write a sequel but has requested to have his name removed from all follow-ups made by DC comics and others that adapt his work. So both projects are works diverge from their original creators' visions, and unfortunately, we may never see how these works were originally going to continue, but continue on they do because here in the world capitalism, good ideas aren't good unless you can make a franchise out of them.
Reluctant Next Chapters
Both projects, the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and the HBO'S Watchmen are projects that were initially not meant to gain any sequels and some will refuse to see some of these properties because they symbolically spit in the faces of their original creators. Personally, although I respect both George Lucas and Alan Moore for the artists they are and for their original creations, as a consumer and as a fan of both properties, I'm just too curious to know how others will continue these stories I've invested so much time and brain-space on. As stated in my last blog post, I had written two essays analyzing the original graphic novel of Watchmen and it was my gateway into reading more mature comics. And what science-fiction nerd hasn't seen Star Wars? I appreciate those fans that are loyalists to both creators, but I'm just too greedy for content. But comparing a season of television to three whole movies isn't exactly fair. Instead, I wanted to compare how these two projects handle the nostalgia and "fan-service" of their respected franchises.
Star Wars: Greatest Hits
Starting with the Star Wars sequel trilogy, it will come to no one's surprise that this entire trilogy has been advertised on the nostalgia of the original movies. The sequel trilogy not only uses all of the key main characters from the original but also recycles a lot of its plot structure from them as well. For example, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the same plot as Star Wars: A New Hope. This may have been on purpose from director J.J. Abrams and writer Lawrence Kasdan, but regardless it showed Disney's intentions for these movies; make them like the original trilogy since fans love them the best out of the whole Star Wars franchise. At first, I didn't particularly mind it with Star Wars: The Force Awakens as I thought the new main characters carried the movie gracefully and were a lot of fun to watch. It gave me confidence that moving forward, we were going to discover new and interesting things about the Star Wars universe with a new cast of characters. I was so interested in where Rey and Finn's respected journeys were headed that even the presence of the older cast members such as Han Solo and Princess Leia didn't take my attention away from their stories. However, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens it was easy to speculate since it was the first movie in the trilogy and its main goal was to get butts in seats for the next two installments. The strengths of Force Awakens, in my mind at least, were going to be determined by its follow-ups. To not go into too much detail, but in my opinion, the sequels were struggling to find a balance between making the newer characters more interesting and using the older characters in the background It shows in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi where everything interesting about Rey and Finn has stripped away and the only highlights from the movie come from scenes with the older characters. And now we have J.J Abrams returning to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and while I enjoyed it, will admit that it struggles to forge an identity for itself beyond just feeling and being very similar to the original trilogy. Sure, the Last Jedi tried to move the trilogy away from its usual tropes, but it ultimately ended with the film going right back to those tropes and leaving nothing much to look forward to for the next installment. I also think the Last Jedi is a fairly boring movie save for one scene, but I'll elaborate on that more in another blog post.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy suffers from an identity crisis. Disney wants to make continuations of the Skywalker saga, but because fans hated the prequel trilogy and loved the original, it feels a need to structure itself off of that original trilogy from its use of mainly focusing on one antagonist, one Jedi, mentors that die along the way, to even just the very look of the trilogy. Despite the sequel trilogy being set 30 years after the original, technology and spacecraft haven't advanced much save for a few new toys for the storm-troopers. Even the "First Order" is just the Empire from the previous trilogy, just with a new paint job. The writers, directors, and producers at Disney who are handling the Star Wars franchise can't seem to think past the nostalgia of the original movies. In a lot of ways, it's why fans of the Expanded universe material don't like the sequels. Although I've read very little of it myself, from what I've heard of the Star Wars expanded universe material, George Lucas and co allowed writers and artists to explore the past, present, and future of the Star Wars universe in ways that even the creator himself didn't think of. It not only expanded the tails of older characters like Luke, Han, and Leia, but they also created new characters just as interesting as the originals and new ideas that truly expanded the scope of the universe and the force.
Watchmen: "The New Testament"
Now on the other side of the spectrum is HBO's Watchmen. Damon Lindelof was approached two times with the comic book property before taking it on, however when he did he didn't want to just adapt it for the small screen as Zack Synder had already done that for the big screen in 2009. No, Lindelof wanted to do the unthinkable; for the longest time, the original graphic novel of Watchmen was famous for being hard to adapt and hard to follow up unless Alan Moore himself agreed to write it. Lindelof and his team wrote a sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen. Like the Star Wars sequel trilogy, HBO's Watchmen is a story that takes place within the same world of the source material but follows a different set of main characters. Where the properties differ is in their approaches to this task. In reading about how Lindelof came to the decisions he made on the show, he said that he wanted the story to center around the new main character: Angela Abar AKA "Sister Night". Everything that happens (for the most part) in the series centers around Angela's perspective and that world just so happens to be a world in which superheroes exist and a giant squid attacked New York 30 years before the events of the show. While we learn later how Angela is connected to the overall mythology of the show, for the majority of the story we're learning things as Angela is learning. While there are moments where the older characters sometimes outshine Angela in her journey, the story still doesn't stray away from the new ones and the older characters (Adrian Vedit, Dr. Manhatten, Agent Blake) are only there to serve the story of Angela's journey.
But a large aspect of HBO's Watchmen that I think puts it above the Star Wars sequel trilogy, is that it doesn't feel like it's source material nor the movie adaptation before it. For some, that was a major problem as the story stirs so far from what Watchmen was about, even down to the setting. Where the original was set in New York in the '80s, HBO's Watchmen is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma...in 2019. Again, this is because our main character is from Tulsa and it is later revealed that she has a deeper connection to the town than we expected. The different settings help to establish this show with its style. Now granted, you can't say it feels like A, B or C since the only other adaptation to compare it with was an under-performing movie from 2009, but it doesn't feel like anything else in the superhero genre either. The main lesson that I think the Star Wars Sequel trilogy should learn from HBO's Watchmen, is that they shouldn't let nostalgia and the use of older characters overshadow the current characters or current story you want to tell in a franchise.
Good Story-Telling Over Everything
Sequels and franchises are hard to make fresh and it's hard as a new creator to add your take on something that is essentially someone else's work and idea. I believe that while it would be easy to just recreate the look and feel of previous works, it is a true art to take a franchise and combine the familiar with something new and even personal. Take Ryan Coogler's Creed for example; it is the 7th movie in the Rocky franchise and even Sylvester Stallone was against it at first. But because Ryan Coogler had approached Stallone by connecting the story of Creed to how much his father used to love the Rocky movies, Stallone approved and joined the project. As far as I know, HBO's Watchmen doesn't come from as personal a place for Damon Lindelof, and I'm not saying that Star Wars needed to be connected to J.J. Abrams personal life in some way to make it great, but that Coogler and Lindelof wanted to tell a story with these respected franchises and they weren't just studio mandates. Star Wars is respectfully different from the Watchmen property. Watchmen's fan-base is not massive or universal and its iconography is only known to comic book fans. Star Wars is a grand universally known franchise (at least throughout American media) and even people who aren't die-hard fans are familiar with a lot of iconography of the franchise. Disney wanted to make their new installments of the Star Wars franchise accessible and appealing to a wider audience; to old fans of Star Wars and new fans. The stakes for HBO's Watchmen were fairly low. No one was asking for a follow up to Watchmen, nor expecting it so there was plenty of room to experiment and present something entirely new. Plus, it's a season of television that allowed for characters and ideas from the show to develop fully. The Star Wars sequel trilogy was long-rumored, anticipated and had the meet the expectations of millions of fans. There was no way that the creators from Disney were going to please everyone and it stumbled in trying to do so. If Disney were bold enough to have created a completely new tone and style for Star Wars divorce of nostalgia and iconography, maybe their directors and writers wouldn't feel as cuffed in their ability to tell the best stories. Instead, we're unfortunately left with a mixed bag of a trilogy.