We Watched the Watchmen: A Roundtable
Nothing Ever Ends Adrian: Snyder-Style
Kessen: The removal of the “alien” at the end appears to many to have been a move to make things more palatable to the modern, hip, cynical, jaded movie audience, rather than a necessity of transference between media. True or false, and if true, how much more of this sort of thing is there? In other words, how many of the alterations seem to be real aesthetic decisions, and how many appear to be marketing?
Matt: I’m not sure if the change was done to trim the budget, or if the writers just thought it was silly, or out of consideration for the audience. If I give them the benefit of the doubt, I think they just changed what they wanted to say.
Brian: [Because] the film follows the plot and structure of the comic book pretty closely, this means it has to deliver that surprising ending: not only does the supervillain outfox the superheroes and execute his Fiendish Plan, but the heroes quickly agree to become complicit. [Snyder] undercuts this anticlimax by making Dan the bearer of moral indignation. In the next scene we get a comfortingly cliched domestic denouement that further dissipates any icky feelings left over from the mass murders.
In a bizarre attempt to, presumably, raise the stakes, the Fiendish Plot here involves not just the death of “half of New York” but the destruction of six cities across the globe. But as with most of the violence in the film, there’s a strange unreality to these acts. They’re bloodless, literally and metaphorically. The comic book had a rich cast of supporting characters, many of whom converged on a Manhattan street corner at zero hour. Alan and Gibbons made it clear that Veidt didn’t have some vague plan to blow things up - he was killing people, lots of people, including characters we’d been following for eleven issues. The final issue of Watchmen began with gruesome depictions of the devastation. But the movie daintily shows a few random people getting vaporized and then switches to wide shots of cool destruction. Genocide is just another set piece. When Jon and Laurie visit the wreckage of New York City, there are no icky bodies. Veidt’s crime might as well be property damage. The enormity of Veidt’s plan comes off as conceptual. There’s nothing to humanize it, which pretty much makes it the antithesis of the original.
Matt: As far as humanizing the death toll, it would have been nice to see more familiar faces than just that counselor bite the dust. (Well, not “nice,” but more effective.) As far as I’m concerned, Sally could have been caught up in the explosion as well. That Lifetime Original Movie that played after Laurie and Dan left Carnac was nearly filler, since it played out exactly as any astute viewer would have figured. A decent attempt was made to flesh out Dan, Laurie, Rorschach, and Manhattan (though Manhattan’s “character” scenes were infuriatingly dull). Ozymandias got short shrift even in the comic, and even though I think the film scripted him well enough, Matthew Goode has no presence and brings no depth to him at all. He’s supposed to be regal and superior, and the whole time I just kept wishing that they could have made the film in the 80s, just so a post-Labyrinth David Bowie could have played him.
Tracy: While all of the other changes made to soften the characters, or make them seem more like the superhero brethren they were meant to parody –the change to the ending screws the pooch, so to speak.
There are two points to the ending that make Watchmen the worthy piece of literature it is. One, it uses the cliche of “first contact” with an alien race, a.k.a the “Star Trek” paradigm, to create peace. This endings is delivered in the secular humanist manner of man learning to (really: being tricked into) acknowledging that he is tiny and weak against the greater threats of a hostile universe. And Two, the conversation that Dr. Manhattan has with Veidt: “Nothing ever ends, Adrian. Ever.” Ozymandias’ doubt sets in. The good work he has accomplished through the murder of millions cannot bring lasting peace. He, too, will have built a monument of peace to crumbling civilization–the lone and level sands stretching far and away from his colossal wreck. How can he justify the bodies, now, to himself?
The ending to Snyder’s Watchmen manages to botch both of these points.
Brian: The change to the ending worked fine for me. I think it might actually be a bit better than the original, actually. It made everything more personal and it made Veidt seem smarter in that he wasn’t just relying on the longshot of being able to destroy Jon - he maneuvered him into leaving Earth for good.
Tracy: Well, here’s the thing about the ending: first contact morphs into a fear of the Superman / God figure of Dr. Manhattan. We are told that the only way that humans will behave is if they are beset by the fear of the watching eyes of a Father-God, whom will punish the world for its bad behavior. Perhaps this theme can be sold more easily to the gen. public, who are primed for this idea of the Punishing God by Judeo-Christian Old Testament sulfur-and-brimstone annihilation. And aliens, after all — too niche. Too nerd.
As a consequence, Dr. Manhattan does not deliver his line to Adrian, who does not experience his moment of cathartic (or tragic) doubt on-screen. He is as assured of his plan as ever, happily rebuilding New York in imagery that hails from post 9-11 healing. John is also denied his final moment of wisdom. Instead, his last act is to book from this galaxy. Honestly now. I may have to agree with you Dex, that Snyder ultimately doesn’t “get” Watchmen, or doesn’t care enough to see its themes realized in such a way as to still imply similarly challenging ethical dilemmas.
Matt: Exploding New York (as opposed to have an alien show up there and kill everyone with a psychic blast, or whatever happened in the book) seems on the surface to be a cheap way to evoke 9/11, but it doesn’t even come off that way in the book. If anything, using Manhattan suggests that the most dangerous thread comes from within, which coincides more closely with far right and far left wing paranoia than the more accessible idea that there’s a real thread “out there” that must be united against. If anything, that conception is more radical than even Moore’s, but I’m not sure that the film as a whole supports that exhortation — if, indeed, it is an exhortation. Instead, I think it comes off more as playing on the cliche of the third-act twist. “Surprise! The killer was among us the whole time!”
David Nguyen-Tri: While changing Adrian Veidt’s plan into a frameup of Dr. Manhattan was alright, I felt that the ending delved into melodramatics that deterred from Moore’s ideas. In particular, adding Nite Owl’s presence to Rorschach’s death scene cheapened it, turning it into annother one of those “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” screaming scenes. Further, while the inevitable doom of Ozymandias’ master plan is pretty much laid out in the comic book, I thought that it wasn’t played up enough in the film.
Kessen: Apart from Ozymandias’ name, do any hints of the doom of his master plan survive? Are new ones introduced?
Tracy: I think that the doom to Ozymandias’ plan remain mostly in conjunction with his name — the Ramses II reference was played up as the password to his master plan computer — and with the imagery associated with Ancient Egypt in his fortress of Near Solitude. He surrounds himself with the accouterments and (rebuilt) statuary of his namesake, but I’m not sure if the imagery actually helps to bring home this theme. For someone who wasn’t familiar with the graphic novel, I’m sure they would have just assumed, “gee, Egyptian themed. Neat!” Ozymandias’ Antarctic wonderland is specifically referred to as “Karnak” in the film. So, anyone with familiarity with the history of Thebes, or with the depiction of the familial strife in Thebes that tears the city apart might have an inkling of the doom that awaits’ Veidt’s plans. But that’s a lot of “what ifs” and “maybes” about it. The film doesn’t attempt to revive these allusions in any meaningful way.
Matt: The journal is still there, but since The New Frontiersman isn’t really developed in the movie, and since there’s no reason to think that anyone will believe it if it’s published, the film’s perspective seems to be that horrible things happen because of good intentions, and it is humanity’s fate that an evil corporate overlord mass murders a host of people to built his utopia. He mentions his fascination with Alexander, and his “Ramses II” password hint at dead kings of fallen empires, but the filmmaking itself doesn’t make much of those parallels — Liles already clarified that, though, so I’m just being redundant.
Tracy: My mind keeps circling back to the climax — of the Watchmen folding so easily in the face of Veidt’s plan. With their amped superheroics, doesn’t this make their collapse at the end of the film more ethically problematic? Doesn’t their extreme moral equivocation and impotence in the final scene with Veidt make it seem even more of a non-sequitor , and thus even more pathetic, than it does in the graphic novel?
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