Every day this week, Laurent Valière meets a creator of one of the most anticipated series of the year 2025. Today, Guillaume Lemens who signs the series adaptation for Canal + of “Sentinelles”, a comic strip by superheroes immersed in the First World War.
Published on 02/01/2025 11:33
Reading time: 3min
In 2009, Xavier Dorison invented The Sentinelsa comic strip about a “robocop” in the trenches. It tells the destiny of Gabriel Féraud, an engineer hired and badly mutilated in the First World War who accepts the proposal of a scientist to be “augmented” and to enter an elite unit of fighters of a new type.
Fifteen years later, screenwriter Guillaume Lemans, keen on genre films – we owe him disaster and zombie films like The night devoured the world – completes the serial version of these for Canal + Sentinels.
It was the theme of comics that initially interested him: “The mix of lots of genres, it’s a war series, but it was also a ‘steampunk’ science fiction serieshe describes. Dorison is a great screenwriter and it was obvious: a Robocop in 1914 was a mix of everything we grew up with in the 1980s when we love cinema. A character who loses everything, who loses his limbs, who is improved. We are in an arms race in fact, which is rooted in what the war of 14 was.”
“We are talking about a story of technological improvement, a cyber story, a man who is taken away from his family, his freedom and sent to war by transforming him into a war machine.”
Guillaume Lemans, screenwriter.at franceinfo
But the series won’t just be trench battles. “We put modern-day Paris, from the Belle Époque, with a spy story insidesays Guillaume Lemans. In any case, it was necessary to open up to female characters, so that we weren’t just on the front lines. And I really wanted there to be fantasy, that is to say with mediums, parascience, telekinetics. And also a little side of Ulysses who tries to join Penelope. I told myself that about the character of Gabriel.”
The series will rely heavily on the outfits of these superheroes from the First World War. “They were armored soldiers in 1914, which was something that was also trueexplains the screenwriter, there have been somewhat clumsy and terrible inventions, very deadly. During the war of 14-18, we tried to invent combat armor which proved very dangerous for its users. We pushed the concept a little further and there is ‘Predator’ also in our series: armor, combat helmets and bladed weapons integrated into combat armor.”
THE Sentinelswith Louis Peres in the role of Gabriel, transformed into a robot called Taillefer. To discover this semester on Canal +.
