Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
The Squid is out!
Watchmen fanboys and fangirls everywhere are up in arms: Zack Snyder has ditched the Squid!
Gone is Adrian Veidt’s plan to unite mankind by the threat of alien invasion. Instead, we have some kind of frame-up job with Dr. Manhattan as the target. Needless to say, such a fundamental shift in plot sends shockwaves through the whole damn storyline.
I think I understand WHY Snyder did it. Manhattan was, to some degree, a peripheral player. One might delete Manhattan from Watchmen and have an intact, tighter plot . . . minus the heart of the story, but hey, Hollywood has screwed the pooch before. But this . . . they’re not screwing the pooch; they’re raping the whole dog pound.
Anyway, by drawing Manhattan deeper into the central plot, Snyder binds him to the central storyline and creates what is, in theory, a more coherent whole. But what’s left is no longer Watchmen. It’s a different story with Watchmen characters.
Watchmen fans are not amused.
(That’s Bruno Ganz in Downfall, a performance my wife regards as The. Best. Fuhrer. EVAH. “He’s not a cartoon bad guy the way every other actor has played Hitler.”)
Watchmen the graphic novel is a classic in large part because of the powerful ending. Adrian Veidt’s narcissism leads him to believe HE knows what’s best for mankind, and HE knows how to fix humanity . . . and he concocts a ends-justifies-the-means scheme wherein fear and violence lead to nothing more than fear and violence and, ultimately, armageddon. But I doubt that made it into the movie, either. We’ll see.
D.
im gonna have to chk that out one day
As it turns out, he alternate ending didn’t change that at all.