Sandman is a comic book published between 1989 and 1996, with a few particular issues before and after, by Neil Gaiman.
The series‘s protagonist is Dream, one of the seven entities known as the Eternals that govern every aspect of human life. He is also known as Sandman or Morpheus and controls the world of dreams.
At first, we find him searching for his lost powers, which he recovers and then clashing throughout the books with characters from other mythology, literary and historical traditions, fighting nightmares that have escaped his control or mending fences with the other Eternals.
The Sandman saga is full of frayed events, characters who disappear and return, in short, a plot that is sometimes confused and therefore very difficult to summarise.
At a certain point in the story Morpheus, after having achieved his goal, which is to recover his powers, finds himself without a purpose.
Thus new characters such as Death enter the scene.
Death is portrayed as a young woman with a very friendly manner and gives a new perspective to the concept of death; something to be accepted with serenity instead of something to run away from. So no longer the skeleton with the scythe.
The development of the story on Netflix.
Sogno is a very peculiar and very powerful creature, but in 1919 he is conjured and then imprisoned by a magic ritual performed by a normal human being, who in reality hoped to conjure and capture Death, who of dream is one of his two sisters, hoping to bring his son back to life.
Imprisoned in a glass bowl for almost a century, Morpheus loses his grip on his magical realm, which begins to decay, with nefarious consequences for mankind as well, in which many fall asleep without being able to wake up, dream bad dreams and so on.
At some point Morpheus manages to free himself, he has to rebuild his power, much weakened, by recovering three tools, the
sand, helium and ruby, which make up a large part of his strength and soul.
There are some variations from the original. There are ethnic and gender diversities in the characters.
The famous John Constantine becomes Johanna and comes across as a character full of charisma and also funny.
It was not easy to do a screen transposition.
But I would say that the result is quite convincing.
I like the fact that the character of the main character, Morpheus, is kept, you can see that he has no human psychology and appears alienating, decidedly unempathetic and even evil at times.
This gives the character charm.
Another strong point of the series is the story as told. There is the main story but there is also space for real stand-alone stories, in which sometimes Morpheus does not even appear or only briefly.
For example, in episode 5 he becomes the absolute protagonist John Dee [played by David Thewlis], who at a dinner party constructs a social experiment about truth, lies and the consequences of human instincts.
Or even in episode 9, where the protagonists are characters engaged in a convention of serial killers.
Another difference that makes the series work is that we have numerous villains who constantly change position and importance the same applies to the good guys.
Available on Netflix
Comments