Watchmen

[HARDKORE]

Just watch this. It was ok but ending sucked. Rent dont buy.

[Cirtur]

Ending sucked how? Is it very much different from the book?

[mountainmage]

It's very, very different than the ending and that's why a lot of fans were disappointed.

[Cirtur]

Different in that it didn't have the squid or something?

Screw this I'm going to go spoil it for myself.

[mountainmage]

Exactly.

In the comic, a giant psychic squid was teleported into the middle of New York by Ozymandias. It couldn't survive outside of the lab where it was created, so when it died it released a psychic shockwave that killed a ton of people. The U.S. believed that aliens attacked and Russia, as a sympathy gesture, ended the cold war.

Whereas in the movie, Ozymandias destroys the world's main cities with exploding energy reactors he had Doctor Manhattan create for him under the pretense of providing free energy for the world. Russia and the U.S. unite against Dr. Manhattan, rather than aliens.

[Rainbow]

I have no idea what the plot of Watchmen is, so I am going to believe what Mage just said. I seriously haven't a clue if he's kidding, anyways.

[mountainmage]

I'm not joking. Those are the actual endings for the comic and movie.

[Cirtur]

I prefer the comic ending if only because I like the idea of artists and scientists working together to create a fake alien.

[mountainmage]

Plus, it was an awesome looking one at that.

[Lethal Interjection]

I can see the merit in both endings, to a degree.
I still prefer the book ending though. The alien would have been a much better world-unifying cause than the scapegoating of Dr. Manhattan, as he was ultimately "created" by the US.
I also liked that in the book he left due to the broken relationship (and thus his only real connection to the world), rather than by the choice of someone else. Everyone in the book needed to make some very important choices, where in the movie some of that is taken away from Manhattan, the most logical one of the group.
Ultimately it was the changes to the love triangle (such as above) that were my least favourite.
That said, I really liked the way the movie was cut, especially with the flashbacks and intro.
I'm really looking forward to watching it again.
I bought the director's cut today at Walmart. Walmart's version has a really crappy slip cover* and the digital copy. I only bought it because it was the same cost as the regular director's cut, and maybe I'll want the digital copy someday.

*It is one of those textured motion covers. Only, it is the same as the regular cover, with the angled picture being slightly shifted. So if you turn it to see the movement, all the picture does is hop a tiny bit, like everyone just phased an eighth of an inch to the left.

[Kimra]

The new ending was just a way to try and make a 'global warming' political statement mixed in with a dumbing down of some of the more intelligent comments on human nature.

[mountainmage]

They didn't even put in anything about the boy reading the comic book.

[Kimra]

They didn't even put in anything about the boy reading the comic book.

Damn them, where was my sympathy for the dead?

[Lethal Interjection]

They didn't even put in anything about the boy reading the comic book.

That I completely understood. And appreciated. It was the part that nearly lost me in the book, and I'm pretty sure it was what did lose my friend.
Basically because I didn't really catch the relevance or symbolism from the story.
And there was no way at all to put that bit into the movie. Too much narration, and an entirely one-character section. You couldn't thread it in like the book, and you couldn't do it in one shot, with both ultimately losing the audience.

[mountainmage]

The character in the comic book was supposed to be a representation of Ozy, since they both achieved their goals on the corpses of their friends.