No, I don’t remember seeing Archie do that. There were several nice banking shots over the prison during the breakout of Rorschach, though. I also liked the shot of Archie zooming down the tunnel and under the river (but how did Dan keep the tunnel from flooding?).
It occurs to me that, other than when he unrecognizingly passed him on the street while Kovacs was holding his “The End is Nigh” sign, Dan never saw Rorschach maskless, is that right? At least until moments before R’s death at the hands of Dr. M.
Another point: Hollis admitted having repeatedly voted for Nixon even though he hated the President. Dan shrugged and said something like, “Well, you couldn’t vote for the Commies, could you?”, and they both chuckled. I guess it was a sign of how dominant Nixon was politically, either that a) the Democratic Party had become so hard-left as to be irrelevant, or b) the Communists had actually become the principal opposition party to Nixon’s GOP. What do you think?
I just saw the movie and I have quick things to say:
I have never read the novel, nor did I really know it existed until I saw the trailer, so from that standpoint lemme defend the ending. Since there was NO back story to show anything about some alien invasion plot, a squid magically appearing would have ruined the ending. Even if you had Ozy explain it as a hoax, I still would have thought the ending to be all kinds of bad. Also, blaming it on Dr. M worked out because it gave him a chance to finally separate himself with humanity, without alienating himself with them in the process. (It also appealed to Ozy knowing Dr. M better than he knows himself)
The random lion thingy could have been left out…that made no sense and just confused me. (although upon reading this thread I get it)
The nudity from big-blue wasn’t needed…just a distraction.
Sex scene wasn’t needed…to gratuitous for how pointless it was
Violence was too graphic…it was making the movie more like 300 just to attract the “blood and guts” crew.
Overall twas a good movie…I enjoyed it…although it had a TON of story, it was done well.
I figured that right-wing propaganda had become so commonplace after so many years of Nixon that Dan, jokingly, is implying that people would think of voting for anyone to the left of the GOP is the same as voting for Commies. In other words, the Republicans have become so dominant and the threat of war so prevalent that the Democrats have become irrelevant and the center-to-left of the spectrum is generally mistrusted.
I liked it quite a lot, though I went in with some knowledge of the graphic novel. I knew about the rape, and the politics, and the end, but not so much that they got in the way of enjoying the movie.
Things I especially liked (including some things that I realized in retrospect):
At the end, the billboard with “In your heart, you know it’s right.” I’m almost certain that’s a reference to Goldwater’s slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” especially since Johnson’s guys parodied that as “In your heart, you know he might,” regarding Goldwater’s hawkishness and willingness to engage in nuclear warfare, and we see that billboard shortly after Ozymandias, well, does.
Ozymandias is, indeed, not a comic-book villain. By the time they get to the end of his quasi-monologue, every city but the last has already been bombed, and there are only a few seconds left there.
The graphic violence. It’s not that I enjoy watching people getting beaten up, but Nite-Owl et al. do not bother to stun or play nice with the people in their way. They make sure that the thugs won’t get up again, and they don’t particularly care if that means bending a knee the other way or shoving a knife through a throat. This isn’t the typical comics where nobody’s ever visibly hurt except the heroes after taking a beating that would long since have killed anyone else.
Dr. Manhattan’s nudity. He simply does not care if people see him naked, and unlike in most comics I’ve read, his body isn’t super-smooth. He has blemishes, and he has nipples. And he has a penis.
Dr. Manhattan’s speech. It’s a little bit odd, and I think it increases in that respect through the movie as he becomes more detached from humanity.
The end of the Mars sequence. Although it seemed beyond ridiculous that a few punches, even from a mask, would do anywhere near that much damage, when the pieces start coming down Manhattan shields Silver Spectre from the fragments. That shows that he’s approached humanity a bit.
Things I didn’t like:
How the hell is Richard Nixon still alive in 1985? How has seventeen years of being President, especially with a lukewarm war going on with the USSR, not given him a stroke or a heart attack? Why doesn’t he at least look 75?
Dr. Manhattan’s nudity. There are too damn many shots of his crotch.
Ronald Reagan being regarded as crazy or a cowboy in 1985? WTF? As far as I can tell, their world doesn’t materially differ from ours until the Vietnam War, and Reagan was already a significant Republican politician before then. He wouldn’t be an elder statesman, but they really shouldn’t be dismissing him so casually.
What the hell was with that blue horned tiger-thing? It wasn’t explained at all.
Personally, I’d kind of like to see if someone can make a decent miniseries out of this.
I disagree. There are no other clues that support that theory, but a few that would lead me to believe that
The CIA assigned the Comedian to investigate HJ after he refused to testify to the HUAAC. While observing HJ, the Comedian discovered his identity, which before was known (?) by only one other Minuteman: his lover, Captain Metropolis. The Comedian used the opportunity and excuse and killed HJ for humiliating him in front of the rest of the Minutemen and posterity, and claimed to the CIA that he had failed in his mission.
In the GN, he loves Laurie, but increasingly can’t relate to her. It’s the fact that he loves her that changes his mind about humanity. I think they lost that aspect in the film a little; he was a bit too androidish to me. In the GN, when Laurie’s mental construct regarding her father breaks down, she throws her perfume at Manhattan’s glass palace, and the bottle is what brings it down. So while it seems ridiculous that a punch or two could do that much damage, the point was that Manhattan’s refuge was also a fragile construct.
It’s a genetically engineered lynx. It wasn’t terribly important to know that in the GN either.
I wonder if they’re going to try to do a novelization of it.
I don’t think there’s any way I’ll make it through 330 posts, so…
I’m sorry to say I think Snyder missed the point. I wondered about it on and off all movie, which I guess is good, but with Nite Owl’s diatribe at Ozymandias and Silk Spectre II’s lines at the end, I came to the conclusion he didn’t really get what was going on, or at least failed to make it happen on screen. Seeing Dr. Manhattan in the movie was very cool - I’m not sure if it replaces the amazing visuals in the book, but they were cool - Haley made a very good Rorschach, and the credit sequence was as good as the reviews said it was. But in the end, it didn’t happen. There were just too many portentous moments and too much slow-mo, and oh yes, too many gross bone breaks. The comic is plenty heavy-minded, but maybe that’s just more bearable on the page, when it’s all happening in your head and doesn’t take 160 minutes or whatever the movie was. I ended up feeling like Snyder actually did want us to think these people were really cool 'cause they were fighting for truth and justice, which ain’t the message of the comic. Maybe the story works on that level (I doubt it), however if it does, it lacks the depth that makes Watchmen unique.
The changes to Ozymandias’ plot, to my surprise, were not a problem at all. I didn’t mind them and they streamlined the movie. But I hated the ending from that point on. Nite Owl’s “Noooo,” and the speech he gave Ozymandias, which must’ve meant something to the writer but didn’t make any sense to my ears, their leaving and the fact that it (I guess) was supposed to devastate Ozy, even though they apparently do nothing to stand up to him, the idea that Nite Owl and Silky II (and she was awful) are apparently going to keep fighting crime, the “nothing ever ends” lines being put in SS’s mouth, nevermind the quality of her delivery, and the “As long as people think Jon is watching over them” line… what the fuck did that mean? Doesn’t the world think he killed 15 million people in a fit of pique? Why will everybody be okay if they think he’s watching instead of, I don’t know, even more terrified?
It didn’t suck, but that stuff really pissed me off and when you compound that with a lot of little changes that subtracted much of the depth from the characters, it definitely detracted from the whole thing. Whatever. I’ll get the book back from my brothers soon and I’ll still have that.
Really? I didn’t get that at all – they seemed to be as much deconstructed hero archetypes in the film as they were in the comic, though possibly they were played more as movie hero archetypes: the gore and the greater reliance on visual impressiveness point to that, in my opinion. But, Rorschach is still a deranged psychopath, Laurie still just the vehicle for her mother’s dreams, and Dan is, well, a rich geek with a costume fetish. Still very broken heroes, it would seem to me.
Yeah, that just wasn’t necessary. No idea why Snyder felt the need to include it.
Well, they were apparently going to in the graphic novel as well, what with Laurie talking about adopting a new name and getting a better costume, and ‘not wanting to stay home changing diapers’. Though I actually missed that implication in the movie, strangely…
Wasn’t that the point? Keeping them terrified of an attack from the outside, so they stop fighting amongst themselves? Kind of like how the rugby jocks work together with the computer nerds when there’s an axe murderer on the prowl or a zombie outbreak? (Mind you, I don’t think making Jon that outside thread really worked, but that’s another thing entirely.)
They still have their personality flaws, yes, but it just played differently with all the fight scenes and the way it was all presented. You don’t put something in slow-mo to show it’s not really that cool, you know? It’s more a feeling than anything specific. In the comic, Rorschach is a badass (although he’s not a stuntman), and the rest of them generally aren’t.
True. I meant that I was left wondering if they’ll be ‘resisting’ Adrian or- well, whatever the hell they’re supposed to be doing, which I wasn’t clear on. They didn’t mention the new identities, they didn’t say what they were doing or where they were going, they just talked. Which is okay, but I expected the scene to have the same kind of place in ths story that it did in the book. And then they didn’t make clear why it was taking place at all.
That was the idea and I believe that’s what was meant, but he expressed it in such a bizarre way that I wondered if we were supposed to get something different out of it. I think the line was “As long as people think Jon’s watching over them, it’ll be alright.” Looking at it I guess this was a last reference to the idea of Watchmen, but the idea of expressing ‘someone waiting to kill them at any time’ as ‘watching over them’ was so weird I wondered if it was being interpreted differently for the movie. The dialogue in the book isn’t great but in the movie it was sometimes cringeworthy.
In one of the very recent (and very interesting) coffee-table books on the art and design of the film is a closeup of the cover of an issue of Nova Express, referring to questions about Nixon’s health and his ability to remain in office.
And slowly, the God-fearing people of the world were replaced with Jon-fearing people. Do good by others and work together, and you’ll enjoy a good life, but break the 10 Guidelines For A Better World and Jon will judge that humanity needs to be exterminated. Or something.
Someone on another board I occasionally read brought this up to indicate the wider, and perhaps not completely foreseen, implications of the changed ending: having Jon be responsible puts so much more of a theistic spin on the end of the story, as opposed to the original, more atheistic treatment. The necessity for human beings to band together in the face of an implacable and incomprehensible Cthulhoid cosmic horror, something completely outside human experience, is replaced with the fear of punishment from the Big Blue Man in the Sky.
I loved the movie and can understand why Snyder changed the ending, but I do wish that they had been able to preserve more of the philosophical implications of the original.
(Oh, and did anyone else notice the “Boys” folder on Adrian Veidt’s computer screen? :p)
I think the Doc is still as much of The Other than the squid was - perhaps even more so since everyone knows he was once human – his lack of humanity, from the world’s perspective, is even more jarring.
