Watchmen Chapter 1 will be available on digital August 13 and 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray on August 27. Nearly 40 years after its initial publication, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen remains a singularly important work in the annals of comic book history. The superhero murder mystery pushed the boundaries of what to expect from the medium, and Hollywood has chased after it ever since.
There was Zack Snyder’s fascinating-yet-flawed live-action feature adaptation , Damon Lindelof’s well-regarded HBO miniseries , and a best-left-forgotten motion comic . Now comes the latest attempt at bringing Moore's enveloping and expansive storyline to the screen, this time via Warner Bros. Animation and their ongoing slate of straight-to-video translations of seminal DC series.
And make no mistake, it's effective. But while this new, two-part take on Watchmen avoids some of the pitfalls of prior versions, it also ends up revealing a few of its own. It may well be the best try so far at translating the iconic graphic novel to the screen, but the one thing Watchmen Chapter 1 fails to do is to make a case for why this story should be consumed in anything other than the printed form.
What was an extraordinary achievement as a comic can't help but feel like a pastiche when ported to another format. Granted, what felt so groundbreaking in the mid-1980s – flawed heroes with feet of clay, intertwining superheroes with real-world politics – feels less so in a world where The Boys and Invinc.