Business As Usual: Watchmen Ending Altered *SPOILERS*
 

**SPOILERS**Fuck Zach Snyder.**SPOILERS**

Apparently it IS possible to do everything exactly the same as the comic and then screw everything up at the last minute. I'm not even sure how the plot works anymore: Manhattan left for Mars, which the world was aware of, allowing the Russians to begin threatening the U.S. without worry of Manhattan stopping Russia's missiles, so how does Veidt convince people that Manhattan did it?

Really, in a lot of ways, it's dumber than Hayter's space lasers, because it changes the theme of the ending, making it more similar to the Dark Knight (I'm glad they picked up on that obvious slant). I just...I'm sure Snyder can never provide an answer for why there can't be a Cthulhu monster other than "SQUIDS ARE SILLY!" The public just will not accept "squid" related disasters in their movies, I suppose. Hell, just the fact he kept referring to it as a "squid" makes me think he doesn't actually give a shit about it like he's pretended to all this time. If he'd been open from the beginning about his disdain for the comic I'd be more accepting of his idiotic alterations as Hollywood's business as usual.

Possible!

Damn it.

I wanted C'thulhu! DAMMIT! I like how they are treating as fanboys being upset over a minor change. It's not a minor change. Yes, he still creates an enemy, but he creates an enemy out of Dr. Manhattan. What was the point in having him go to Mars just to turn things around and make it look like he blew shit up? The alien worked, or was supposed to work, because it was an enemy that didn't exist. It wasn't real. They had nothing to fight. Here, they have the Watchmen equivalent of GOD to fight.

...Is lynching someone still illegal?

There is the slight possibility there is more than one ending, but it seems like it would cost a lot of money to have alternate endings and if they created an alternate ending for test audiences just to surprise us with...the original ending, it would seem pretty stupid, wouldn't it?

... huh. I actually can almost see this working. Original ending: [spoiler]entire world unites against scary aliens who are Lord knows where, this ending: entire world unites in case Dr. Manhattan ever decides to return from Mars. The difference in effect isn't so terribly jarring, but it does change a few aspects: most notably Manhattan would be forced to leave this galaxy/dimension/reality instead of choosing to do it. Also it seems the plan would make more sense with an unknown threat rather than one that presumably has been thoroughly analyzed over the last few years. Yeah, not at all sure about that.

Spoilers in the title so no spoiler text for me.
You see the problem with having an actual real enemy is that if Dr Manhatten dies or leaves the planet or pretty much anything the threat is gone. Or is just like "Nah, I didn't do it and I'll teleport you to the machine that did" as Ozy didn't know that Dr Manhatten would accept his plan.
An imaginary enemy from another dimension is a much more persitent threat.

its like the universe is actively vindicating Moore's hatred of adaptations.

I don't know if I hate this or not. I can see it working really well, I can see it sucking lots of ass.

About Dr. Manhattan choosing to leave or being forced to. Can you really force god to do anything? He still would be choosing to go with Ozy's lie in order to give mankind a reason to turn their aggression towards something other than themselves.

This could work or it could not. As long as the importance of the story and how it's supposed to affect the audience remains the same and is replicated as best possible then I'll be fine with it. "As best possible" doesn't have to mean sticks to the comic in every way.

He would probably choose to support Ozy's plan, but Ozy would never create a plan that depended on someone else going along with it. He killed the people who made the monster. He tried to kill Manhattan. He is not the sort to leave his plan up to anyone but him.

But Ozy did create a plan that that depended on someone reacting exactly the way he planned. His plan did hinge on Manhattan deciding to abandon Earth for Mars.

He planned on a way to kill Manhattan as well and admited later that he wasn't sure it would work.

So he's got Manhattan figured out so well emotionally that he can predict what he's going to do. And he is willing to go through with a plan even if he's not sure it will succeed.

Please keep in mind I'm not saying I like the new ending, I'm just saying it could work and I'm going to see the movie anyways to see if it draws the same reaction that the comic did.

There's a large distance between forcing someone to leave under public pressure and expecting them to go along with your plan once they figured it out.
If Ozy knew Dr Manhatten would protect the knowledge of Ozy's plan Ozy would not have tried to kill Dr Manhatten.
If Ozy knew Dr Manhatten would have been fine with it he could have rung him up and been like "Ozy, this is my plan. Kept quiet about it."

Yeah I was thinking about it after my post, and I think Meister summed it up well.

Plus it also removes Ozy as an unquestionable asshole when he kills everyone and everything related to the project creating the creature or teleporting it in. Remember that the Watchmen world is like ours but kind of advanced, if he doesn't need to explain teleporting other than that Dr Manhattan can do it, it might work in their favor.

I mean I'm going to go see it because I have to, but I'm going to flip-flop on my Hate O Meter for a while.

How exactly do you force Dr. Manhattan to do anything? If he decided to stay on the planet after the fact there's not a damn thing anyone could do about it. So what if the people hate him, he really only cares about one of them, the rest are just interesting miracles.

He could stay and put himself out in the spotlight and tell the truth about Ozy's plan. I think enough people would believe him that it would ruin the intended effect.

But he returns to the Earth, not just for her, but for everyone. To save everyone. If it had just been for her, he wouldn't have said no at first. One thing I love about Manhattan is how he can know the future, and still be surprised about something he knew would happen. He's very... interesting...

He returned to save the Earth. In this version, I get the feeling he's going to get there, realize that leaving Earth is the best way to save it, and then do so. Granted that does change lots of things, and it still isn't original Watchmen, but it might make the movie acceptable.

Maybe?

I hope.

I think another general reason this worries me, is because whenever a change is made in a movie from the source material, Watchmen or not, I cannot think of a single case where the change was better than the original, only worse. Not just from a fan perspective, either.

Directors and whatnot like to put their own "special" twist on something when bringing a book, or some such thing, to the big screen. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it's unnecessary, which I feel this is, and dumb, which I guess we'll see.

Especially when the original authour is excellent. You need an author as good to pull it off and authors that good aren't writing hollywood screenplays.

Chuck Palahniuk liked the movie ending to Fight Club better than the book one which he himself had written.

Chuck Palahniuk is kind of his own worst enemy when it comes to some of his writing, I believe, but that's kind of off topic.

Regardless, I think it could go either way, but this is probably the first time it has a decent chance of working well in the movie's favor in a long time.

Notice how I said when the original author was excellent. Yeah.

Snyder pretty much said who would believe in a giant squid forcing world peace.

The same people who believe in blue guys with powers over space and time. It is frikking fiction.

If Manhattan leaves earth permanently who kills Rorschach?

Is it internally consistent fiction that makes logical sense, though?

I think it is, actually, at least no more or less so than the alien. They can pretty much substitute "giant explosions everywhere" for "giant thing appears," and everything else can still happen as it does in the book, i.e. Manhattan can still kill Rorschach while he's at Ozymandias' antarctica retreat. No one witnessed him return for a few hours in the book, either.

... you know, I always did think it was a bit weird how, in a book about superheroes that makes a point of stating that there is only one guy with actual supernatural powers, they suddenly start talking about psychic people near the end like they're the most normal thing in the world. You could argue their existence was something Ozymandias kept under the hood together with the necessary knowledge about genetic engineering, but it still threw me off even the first time around.

My desire to say you're wrong is overwhelmed by my desire to agree, and they're kind of having a war with each other right now. Let me get back to you.

That's one of the things I wonder about, too; maybe he did it to make the movie easier to swallow? Because if I was a movie script writer (Which I could totally see) and someone said that, at the end of the book, psychics are introduced to make something more threatening, I'd go, "Uh, can we work that out?"

In Watchmen it worked because it could layer the fact that this is an alternate universe of the 1980s, since Manhattan advanced sci-fi tech by a thousandfold, as represented by lots of the tools used. I'm not sure an audience would pick up on that, especially not since hovercrafts like Archie have been used in X-Men movies over the last ten years, and Batman gadgets have become almost staples.

Regardless, I'm going to go watch the trailer again.

What? Could they not afford four seconds of dead CG monster?

The point of the Squidbilly was to horrify the world with the sudden appearance of something totally outside all previous human experience.

Swapping that out for 'setting off a lot of bombs' seems to mute that somewhat. Even if they are super-swanky Doc Manhattan bombs. Also at a glance it would appear to conflict with his whole thing about trying to avert nuclear war.

I mean in all honesty I always thought the Squidbilly itself was a little bit weak dramatically, but the bombs thing is substantially weaker.

Actually this is a good point. All during hte cold war people built bigger and bigger bombs. The response of the other side? Let's build an even bigger bomb.
Aslo Dr Manhatten is someone that can be reasoned with. People would try and side with him and get him on thier side. Alien space squids are not like that. The only option is for everyone to work together because what's happening, no one knows.

Ah, the good old 'watering down' approach to adaptation.

Apparently giant C'thulhu monsters aren't cool nowadays. Nowadays sucks, let's go back to when C'thulhu, Yog-Sothoth and I would all get together for a game of insanity chess.

ALSO: Nuklear wepons do not send out psychic images of babies eating their way out of the womb.

My perspective is from the very beginning of this project Snyder has gone on and on about how he wouldn't back down on making this as faithful an adaptation as possible, standing up for leaving it in 1985, keeping everything exactly the same as a comic...and then he changes the ending and goes, "WELL OF COURSE MOVIES CANNOT BE EXACTLY THE SAME AS THEIR SOURCE MATERIAL, SOME THINGS JUST NEED CHANGED, IT'S THE OVERALL THEME THAT'S IMPORTANT." If he hadn't lied in the beginning I wouldn't be mad at him in particular at this moment, simply at the entirety of Hollywood in general like usual.

Next he'll have Ozymandias die at the hand of Nite Owl (Hayter script as an example) and say, "WELL THE AUDIENCE WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCEPT SOMEONE DOING THAT AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT. DON'T WORRY, THE WORLD IS STILL TRICKED INTO BELIEVING THE LIE, AND SUCH, JUST THIS WAY THE VILLAIN GETS HIS COMEUPPANCE, AS IS TRADITIONAL TO THE THEME OF COMIC BOOK MOVIES AND SUCH. REALLY IT'S NOT SO IMPORTANT THAT OZYMANDIAS' LIVES AS THAT HIS PLAN TO FOOL THE WORLD WORKS, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?"

The idiocy of keeping everything exactly the same and then changing stuff like this is stupid, especially since it makes for plot holes (as someone else pointed out, Veidt is trying to prevent nuclear war...so he blows up half the world's cities? The point of the comic was that he destroys half of one major city, causing enough destruction to stun the world into peace but not enough to actually 'cause what he was trying to avoid, the death of billions.)

I get the distinct feeling that Snyder didn't make the changes personally.

Like, I picture this going on: Snyder demands up and down to keep the movie as much like the comic book as possible. Writers change something. He demands they change it back. The one who's paying for the whole movie says, "Naw, keep it in, I like it," and Snyder's hands are tied.

Most he can do is damage control for PR and hope for the best.

That's what I think happened, anyway, don't quote me on that.

This change for some reason doesn't quite sting that badly for me. I'm not quite sure why.

I imagine the plot holes won't be as bad as we're worried they'll be. I'm sure there will be some sort of explanation as to exactly why this results in peace. It just won't be as good as Moore's.

Yah, it bothers me that Snyder goes on so much about being completely faithful, using the comic as a storyboard, changing as little as possible, etc etc, and then he changes one of the only things I really care about being changed.
If you're just going to copy paste the comic into movie form, it won't be a good movie, but this is just a bad change.

tl;dr: if it's not broken, don't fix it.

I don't know which interview I read it in, but Snyder has stated that the changed ending was already written before he was even attached to the project. If I can find it I'll link it...

I think it ties the story up neater. Manhattan really never seemed like the kind of person to react one way or another to Ozzie's plan. His reaction? "Cool. I'm gonna go away and play with making humans.

I found the alien stuff jarring when I read through Watchmen for the first time. "What the hell is going on?" went through my head whenever they cut to the Missing Artists Colony.

Using an apathetic god who we've seen in the story neatens up the plot threads.

So wait, am I understanding this properly? Oxymandias' plan to avert nuclear war now involves nuclear war? Or worse? Doesn't that sort of defeat the entire purpose?
There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that, as previously noted, Oxymandias knows that Squid monster is going to just wreak havoc and destruction in a single, contained area. For all Oxymandias knows, though, Dr. Manhattan could say "screw your plan" and, as an intelligent, autonomous entity, screw Oxymandias over. I'm not sure why Oxymandias, for that matter, would concoct a plan that singlehandedily relies on demonizing God. I mean Oxymandias of all people should know that blaspheming a deity with unlimited powers didn't exactly work well for the last Egyptian Pharoah who tried.

There's also the whole angle of Rorschach's perspective, and how Rorschach has a legitimate shades-of-gray greivance against Oxymandias in the original comic, because Oxymandias did in fact cause untold amounts of death and destruction with his squid from outer space. Here, either A: Oxymandias legitimately causes nuclear catastrophe, in which case, what the hell is the point, if nuclear catastrophe was what you were trying to avoid? OR B: Oxymandias simply uses the THREAT of Manhattan and nuclear devastation to unite the world, in which case nothing's actually been destroyed, and Rorschach just looks like a stubborn ass.

Either way, in the movie, Oxymandias or Rorschach's going to come out of their quarrel looking idiotic. The brilliance of Watchmen was that they both had legitimate arguments and it was difficult to "choose a side," as Oxymandias justified the slaughter of thousands if not millions and tried to cover it up, while Rorschach is a stickler for "truth" but telling the truth has lots of consequences and could lead to nuclear armageddon. The idea, though, was that Oxymandias knew that the worst-case scenairo of teleporting the squid monster was destroying a single city, without nuclear radiation contaminating everything, so in essence, he sacrificed New York City to save the world. That's very different from the threat of Manhattan going berserk and destroying the world, or whatever kooky vision this version has in store.

EDIT: Finally, part of the brilliance of the comic is that Moore refuses to give readers the slightest clue as to "which side Manhattan is on" until the very end, when Manhattan listens to Oxymandias' argument and makes his choice. This is sort of important because as a deity, we automatically essentially know that whichever side Manhattan chooses, if he even chooses a side, is going to "win." In the end, Manhattan kills Rorschach, thus suggesting that he'll at least go along with Oxymandias and refuse to expose him -- Manhattan agrees with Oxymandias, even if Manhattan sort of leaves him on a "downer note" and abandons the Earth entirely in the end.

So any movie portrayal in which Manhattan chooses willingly to work alongside Oxymandias, or even simply to accept Oxymandias' plan earlier in the script, hurts the integrity of the show because you know how it's going to turn out much sooner. At least with the comics, in the very last issue you were still wondering whether Rorschach, Nite Owl or whoever might disagree with Oxymandias and convince Manhattan that Oxymandias had to pay for his sins. Or, Manhattan could have simply left Earth to its fate, but not dealt with Rorschach, allowing Rorschach to "expose to the truth" -- or simply forcing Oxymandias to deal with Rorschach himself, in what would have been a "fairer fight."

So I'm not sure how this change doesn't really have a monsterous effect on how Watchmen ends and how the characters are portrayed.

Just sayin' Snake: Ozymandias.

Ozzy.

My biggest problem with the Ozymandias character is that, OK, he wants us to think of Ramses II, but Moore clearly has the Shelley poem in mind and Adrian is entirely ignorant of this poem, or what the meaning of it is.

I'll agree with that.

Other than that I can't help but feel like execution is going to matter a ridiculous amount in the end when the movie comes out. If they tweak some stuff that we're hearing about now in the end result that hasn't been announced yet - or hell, even if all of this is some bass-ackwards misinformation campaign - could change everything. I'm not saying it's very likely, but still.

Plus, we've got like four or five months left on the wait; I've been circling like a hawk over this movie, and my wings are getting tired.

Ozymandias, Oxymandias, whatever. Same thing. Not my fault Moore chose really long, unnecessarily convoluted names for his characters. What's wrong with superheroes with simple, memorable names, like Batman and Captain America?

This. Said it much better than I tried to do earlier.

I'm going to hope you were being facetious, as the name Ozymandias was fairly important to Adrian Veidt's character.