Belated Blog

Watchmen Ending

I wasn’t going to write a review on Watchmen – I can’t think of anything to say that hasn’t been said a million times before, and I’m still not going to write a review. What I will do, however, is talk about the ending of the film, and how it differs from the book.

Arr, below ‘ere be spoilers, if ye be wan’in to read the book, or have yet ter see the film, turn back, these waters are not fer you, land-lubber.

Before I start, I may as well just clarify that I am a huge fan of both the book and the movie. The comic was fantastic, and I fell in love with it right away, and the movie was a very good representation of it. Obviously, due to budgetary, and (mostly) time constraints, they could not film everything that was in the novel, some parts had to be left out or changed (hopefully less with the directors cut), and what they did change or cut is very understandable.

No matter how good the movie was, there were always going to be pretentious people saying how much better the novel is, and how the novel in itself is unfilmable. To a certain extent, this is true, the novel is better, there’s much more content there, but the film is, in every sense, watchmen, from start to finish, it’s the same as the book. The characters are the same, the sentiments are the same, the plot is the same…

That is, except for the ending. The ending is the largest change from the book to the film.

I guess I should quickly sum up what the two endings are.

In both the movie and the book, Ozymandias is the villain, albeit ambiguously (was what he did really good?), and both endings involve New York being destroyed.

However, in the book, good old Ozy was experimenting with genetic mutation, which he used to create a giant squid with psychic powers which activate on its death. He teleports this into the centre of New York, and it’sPsychic shockwave kills many, many people in the city. This ending works through the idea that everyone would believe this was part of an alien attack on Earth, and the two sides of the Cold War would put their differences aside in order to combat the nonexistant alien menace.

In the film, Ozymandias decides that instead of the giant mutated sea creature, the best way to save the world is to make everyone hate Dr. Manhattan. I know to people who are fans of the book, this sounds weird, but it actually works surprisingly well, as I will explain later. He detonates small psychic shock waves in cities all over the world, with the idea that if they felt that the superman hated everyone equally (and then left the planet) he may come back and do even more damage, and because of this they would have to team up. Of course, just as in the book, it works, and there is an uneasy truce between the two main super powers of the world.

Now, since the outcomes of the endings are the same, some people may just write them off as being as good as each other. However, if we take the story and for one (wonderful) minute pretend it’s real life, a couple of things stand out, at least to me. The books ending would be a little hard to accept, and I think it’s likely hood of working could be much less in a real world situation. Each side would likely accuse the other of creating the beast, or they would just flat out not accept it as a valid reason for a truce. After all, it did only hit New York, surely giving the Russians an upper hand?

The movies ending, I think, is much more likely to work. It hit several major cities in the world, so that no one country could feel singled out, and it involved a threat that they all actually knew existed, Dr. Manhattan.

You may be thinking right now that the ending in the film makes more sense (but is in no way as awesome), but that might change when you factor in the longevity of the solution. The films truce could well break down when they perhaps consider that Manhattan is no longer watching them, or they fail to pick him up on any satellite scans or anything (they did somehow work out he went to Mars, didn’t they), where as the books ending is much more likely to last – it’s a threat they had never seen before, and so would quite likely not pick up again in a hurry, which would scare us even more.

Another huge difference, is that with the squid, only one city and it’s inhabitants are wiped out, where as with the S.Q.U.I.D (a nice reference Snyder put in) many many more people were wiped out. It would appear that the Ozy’ in the book is much more efficient with his planning.

I still found the film amazing though, it really was awesome.

And to all you who didn’t at least it wasn’t like this.