Review: Wish We'd Been Able to Watch Ourselves
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2011
While it had a promising concept, The Watchers was too scatterbrained to really pull it off. The characters are nowhere near as well developed as they needed to be to make me care about the drama that was unfolding in the huge time gaps, and, more importantly, nowhere near developed enough to be particularly memorable to the point that some scenes, with their influx of new names, are just downright confusing. It feels like the story picks up halfway through the actual narrative, with the Watchers already having been discovered and revealed to the world, and as a result I felt like I missed out on a lot of what would have been scarier, more important scenes than what follows in the story itself. The time jumps, however, are ultimately what ruins this story; Watchers needed to be a full-fledged novel to really carry off the sort of story it's going for here, and when the story keeps jumping days at a time ahead with little warning, it's hard to remain invested in what feels like a bare bones narrative as it is.While it needed an editor and more time to develop, Watchers still has a lot of promise and is something I'd like to see more developed in virtually every way. As it stands, however, it's too confusing, haphazard, and skeletal to really engage.