The Sandman (2022)

In 1916, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), the king of dreams and nightmares, has ventured from his realm to hunt for a nightmare.  The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook) has escaped to the waking world to become a serial killer.  No sooner does Morpheus find The Corinthian than he is entrapped by an occultist, Sir Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance).  Burgess takes the Sandman's tools - a ruby, a helmet, and a bag of endless sand - and demands that Morpheus resurrect the son who died in World War I.  Morpheus doesn't deign to speak to his captor.  It is 100 years before Morpheus is freed when the enchantment holding him is broken.  He finds that his powers are limited without his tools and he quests for them.  Of course, he knows that The Corinthian is still loose.

This Netflix series based on a popular Neil Gaiman comic book series (1989 - 1996) is interesting but entirely too woke.  One of the common complaints on IMDb is that multiple characters have been race and gender swapped.  John Constantine (the same from the 2005 Keanu Reeves movie) is here Johanna Constantine.  The presence of blacks throughout English history is ahistorical and kind of goofy.  Really, so little of the series takes place in historic England that one wonders why black characters are prominently included.  However, these are small things compared to the LGBT representation and almost universal presence of mixed-race couples.  Johanna Constantine is a Lesbian and her girlfriend is black.   Alex Burgess, son of Roderick, loves Paul, a black man.  The princess - an unspecified British Royal - is seeking to marry Kevin, a black man.  In the diner where John Dee (David Thewlis) misuses the Sandman's ruby, we have a mixed couple (Filipino woman & bisexual black man), a Lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual waitress, and a heterosexual man; just your average random selection of people in upstate New York.  In Florida, we meet a drag queen named Hal who owns a B&B.  It also turns out that The Corinthian is gay, having several opportunities to express his affection.  Probably around 50% of all kisses in the show were homosexual.  Representation, don't you know.

The show has promise but the woke propaganda is hard to overlook.  Clearly, this wasn't present in the source material from 25 years ago.  No, this is something that modern Wokesters injected.  I don't mind the race swapping secondary characters (Idris Elba was great as Heimdall in the Thor movies) but gender-swapping and the flood of LGBT characters is grating.

Skip.