《保衛奇俠》的新型蒙面大軍

A NEW TYPE OF CAPED CRUSADER IN WATCHMEN

FROM LOGAN TO DEADPOOL to Amazon’s recent TV series The Boys, the superhero genre is ripe for critique and subversion. But there’s one creation that remains the best deconstruction of the superhero mythos: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. Following Zack Snyder’s mostly

faithful 2009 film adaptation, now Damon Lindelof

(Lost, The Leftovers) has created a nine-episode continuation of the comic, that he calls a ‘remix’.

First, a quick recap of the original graphic novel (skip this paragraph if you don’t want it spoiled): in an alternate reality 1985 where ‘superheroes’ are just

vigilantes fighting in masks, former masked hero

Rorschach discovers that fellow former hero Adrian Veidt plans to stop an impending nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union by unleashing an attack on New York City made to look like an alien invasion. The plan kills three million people, but it stops the war and unites mankind against a new common enemy.

While the original Watchmen was a commentary

on Cold War anxieties in the US, Lindelof’s Watchmen

series examines the deterioration of race relations in the country. It is 2019 in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Police officers are required to wear masks to protect

their identity after a white supremacist group launches

a terrorist attack on the force. When a fellow officer is

murdered, a masked policeman named Sister Night

(Regina King) sets out to find the mastermind behind

the group’s resurgence.