Tell me as objectively as you can what this movie did right and what it did wrong

Tell me as objectively as you can what this movie did right and what it did wrong.

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youtube.com/watch?v=SOSVAHXF4oI
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>what this movie did right
nothing
>what it did wrong
everything

>right
casting was decent, looked nice
>wrong
rushed to an ending that was an abominable fuckup, 2edgy at times

Right
>casting
>acting
>cgi
Wrong
they rushed too much, watchmen couldn't be all put together into a single movie, it had to be a mini series or 2 part movie

>Right
Amazing casting except for Veidt and Laurie, accurate sets and art design, Dan actually reacts to Rorachach's death (personal bias)
>Wrong
Everything else.

The beginning montage was great

The pacing was fucked

>right
(Mostly) great casting with very good performances all around, beautiful shots
>wrong
The explosion at the end

...

Right: big blue cock
Wrong: boring

It had a terrible fucking soundtrack, completely obnoxious, obvious picks and terrible placement. It's hard to take some of the more emotional scenes seriously when you have Simon and Garfunkle blaring over what should be a quiet moment.

wrong:
>casting of ozy
>costume design
>capeshit tier fight scenes

right:
>pretty much everything else

>rushed to an ending that was an abominable fuckup
Everyone said this but the ending is not only more logical than the ridiculous multi-person conspiracy of the original, it also dovetails with the plot point of the engine that Manhattan and Ozymandias are working on.

Of all of Snyder's capeshit it's the most elegant and a significant upgrade from Alan Moore's looney-tunes tinfoil hat.

right >manhattan looked great
wrong >no squid, pacing was poor,
just lifting iconic moments from the comic and making a 10sec clip about them is not cinematic, it is a pop video

NO. FUCKING. SQUID. HACK SNYDERS ENDING MAKES NO LOGICAL SENSE

This movie brings out the worst Snyder supporters next to BVS.

>all these faggots mad about the squid
the squid fucking sucked, get over it children.

To be fair the vast majority of the soundtrack was taken directly from the comic

As someone who isn't biased because he's in love with the "visual novel" or anything:
It was a shit movie. It had its moments simply because the material is very rich and accurate about human nature. But as a movie, it just completely failed: Plotholes, goofy fighting, 30 second scenes are supposed to showcase all this meaning so it just seems like an uninspired lecture, and it just seemed so off and forced to give so much screen time to owldude when clearly, every single other character is so much more fun to watch.

digits have spoken

Doesn't mean they weren't terribly placed and unsubtle. I would have been happier with generic orchestrated stuff over some of the songs we got solely for their terrible placement and frequency.

I'm curious, what plot holes did you think it had? I always love hearing the perspective of someone who's not big on comics.

he has no coherent argument, so don't expect a coherent response.

Not that guy, but this is more of a fault of the source material:
>capture dangerous and blatantly insane man
>don't send him to a high security mental institution and put him under extreme isolation
>throw him in fucking Rikers, in gen pop, surrounded by criminals who only reinforce and enable his world view
>don't even make an effort to treat him and give up after a few sessions just because he's being predictably uncooperative
I thought it was pretty messy and just written so we could have a scene with Laurie and Dan doing shit in costume and Rorschach being badass.

Worst thing was Rorschach being written as Batman. Movie looked nice.

>What it did right
I don't know, I never watched it
>What it did wrong
Enabled the rise of capeshit

All that shit is in the comics.

And if you're from Sweden I forgive you for taking a dim view of this, but the prison system in America is beyond fucked and we're not even in the middle of a huge recession and a Cold War going hot. It's perfectly reasonable to assume the prison would be absolutely overburndened, and it makes perfect sense to put an unrepentant murdered vigilante in max security.

I just said it was a fault of the source material, cockscrew.
>It's perfectly reasonable to assume the prison would be absolutely overburndened, and it makes perfect sense to put an unrepentant murdered vigilante in max security.
We let people who've done worse off with insanity pleas all the time. What made Rorschach different? The guy can't even talk in complete sentences. He obviously shouldn't be in a jail, but even then there's no reason why they wouldn't have put him under isolation away from the rest of the prisoners, for everyone's safety.

what it did wrong
>excessive violence
>some shitty choices of music
>annoying ass blue color filter over everything

what it did right
>all of the casting except maybe ozymandias
>action scenes in general
>look of the movie
>faithfulness to comic
>gritty tone and keeping the r-rating
>a sensible compromise to the ending to make more sense than the comic would

>What made Rorschach different?
The cops in the Watchmen universe are petty assholes who caused vigilantes to become outlawed because they were pissed that they were being put out of a job, and Rorschach was especially hated because a) he kept fighting crime despite the ban, and b) he had no problem attacking cops and killing criminals. They probably don't give a shit about his well-being and would probably come down extra hard on him regardless for the above reasons.

maybe solitary confinement doesn't exist in the universe where nixon won a third term? or maybe it's already filled to capacity? the prison would have to be in a shambles if that mustache-twirling midget was running things so openly. and the entire thing is a trope of prison stories anyway.

what we should concern ourselves with the adaptation qua adaptation, and how well Snyder handled it. it's amazingly faithful to the source material while being both entertaining and chilling.

>right
copied what was on the comic

>wrong
thought it could improve on the comic by changing important stuff

>right
it tried. it exists, for an interesting blend of the right and wrong reasons. most of the casting and performances are very good. the style and color palette snyder has works with the material. the opening montage is kino, and all of the music is executed perfectly.

>wrong
the pacing and reveals are a disaster in the late 2nd and early would be 3rd act. the fight scenes are... lets just not. the mars sequence is fucking horrible. malin akerman is the one performance that is atrocious (goodes ozzy is sorta mediocre but underrated imo). because of the massive pacing problems, the ending feels like it wraps up too nicely and way too quickly. also, snyder was clearly a slave to the source and not inspired to do much with himself in regards to camera placement and the cutting and tracking is cookie cutter.

i still love it, but its a mess.

right
>best intro in kino history
>god tier sound track
>god tier cinematography
>actual suspense if you hadn't read the comic you didn't know what was going to happen
>amazing characters with depth to them and complex personalities instead of cardboard cutouts
>the only realistic portrayal of a mortal turned god going through phases and ending up at absolute resignation
>god tier ending

wrong
>dwell too long on several scenes that weren't relevant for story progression or character development

youtube.com/watch?v=SOSVAHXF4oI
Was this the most kino scene in the movie?

What about what I wrote was incoherent? Are you a butthurt fanboy?

It starts with an all-powerful being having to win a war by manually and individually killing the soldiers.
Then you have this being that can win a war by itself and change matter, but you still need a couple hobos with shotguns, for the plot.
That being doesn't give one shit about pregnant women being murdered, but somehow gives a shit about securing Indochina for France or protecting capitalism.
They're capable of designing all kinds of weapons and gadgets, but don't share any of that with the government they work for.
Ozzy is also basically omnipotent and omniscient and must know that Rohrschach has kept a diary all his life, but doesn't think of that.
Blue guy stops caring about the love of his life because she gets older but some fresh tits convince him to suddenly care about Earth again.
Ozzy thinks of everything, except maybe not leaving easy-to-avoid traces everywhere.
And so on.

>what we should concern ourselves with the adaptation qua adaptation, and how well Snyder handled it. it's amazingly faithful to the source material while being both entertaining and chilling
Yeah okay Zack. There wasn't anything chilling about that movie.

You forgot about how America has their own pet god and yet still worries about nuclear war, never sending him for negotiations or peace talks or even to intimidate the Russians into complacency.

Or even develop a proper rocket shield; I mean shields were already a thing then, he just would've had to improve them slightly.
Once you use a god in your story, your only copout is "he doesn't care" but everything else just requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.

I could rebutt every point but I just don't have the patience.

>It starts with an all-powerful being having to win a war by manually and individually killing the soldiers.
It takes a while for a man-turned-god to learn the extent of his powers. Or, capitulation by the Vietnamese is preferable to exploding every single one of them instantaneously.
>Then you have this being that can win a war by itself and change matter, but you still need a couple hobos with shotguns, for the plot.
This is how America fights a war. They would never send Superman alone.
>That being doesn't give one shit about pregnant women being murdered, but somehow gives a shit about securing Indochina for France or protecting capitalism.
Explained, serves a plot point (Manhattan losing his humanity.)
>Ozzy is also basically omnipotent and omniscient and must know that Rohrschach has kept a diary all his life, but doesn't think of that.
Except he's clearly not omnipotent or omniscient. In fact the entire theme of the comics is that even the super-powered person in the room isn't aware of all the pieces in the puzzle. Why would a literal mortal be more capable? It's amazing he accomplished what he did; it's poetic justice that it's implied to unravel with a simple oversight.

Ok that's all you get.

>right
Quite a lot actually, it takes most of the key point from the book, albeit washes them in Snyder gloss
>wrong
The ending, which completely misses the point of the actual ending and makes no sense whatsoever

>The ending, which completely misses the point of the actual ending and makes no sense whatsoever
how so?

I’m pretty sure it outright states in the movie (if not I know it does in the book) that Manhattan can only stop a certain portion of the missiles.
Also manhattan isn’t “God” he’s a dude who pretty much got put in god’s shoes and his whole story arc is basically him coming to terms with it

>thinking the ending makes any sense

The whole idea with the alien in the book was that it was an otherworldly force belonging to no country, so earth would unite and fight a common enemy. Manhattan is all American. What happens when an American hero kills millions, even if they're also his own? Countries would hold American accountable for THEIR fuckup.

>manhattan isn't god
>ends the moving suggesting he "might create some life" in the universe
He becomes a god elsewhere.

>I could rebutt every point but I don't have the time so I'll write a long-ass response and just ignore some points
Okay

>It takes a while for a man-turned-god to learn the extent of his powers.
So he knows how to change matter and make humans explode but he can't redirect some bullets into the leader(s)?

>This is how America fights a war.
It's literally not; Americans have always tried to avoid boots on the ground, whether it was using foreign fighters, nuclear weapons, or drones. You're a fucking idiot.

>Explained, serves a plot point
"It's not a plothole because it may make no sense but it serves a plot point"
You really are a fucking idiot.

>In fact the entire theme of the comics is that even the super-powered person in the room isn't aware of all the pieces in the puzzle
No, the point is that he would be aware if he wasn't actively sabotaged. Whereas Ozzy simply forgets to cover his tracks, not use company employees, or to choose a password more secure than "1234"

But keep jerking it to your capeshit

In the film Manhattan destroys several American cities. This is shown quite clearly; in combination with his tv-interview meltdown it's easy to infer that he's broken from the Americans and gone rogue. He takes the place of the "otherworldly force".

I really shouldn't have to explain this though, it's shockingly obvious.

This was undeniably superkino and Snyder is a fucking genius. I would genuinely suck Snyders dick for making this, but not in a gay way

>Countries would hold American accountable for THEIR fuckup.

The whole point of the ruse is to provide an enemy that cannot be defeated and will exterminate you if you disobey its commandment to cease hostilities. The situation the ruse establishes is if you raise arms you will be annihilated by a literal god and there is fuck all you can do about it...

It says so in the movie yes but just because you point out a plothole yourself doesn't make it any less of a plothole. The guy can change his form, substance, freeze time, teleport himself to other planets - but he can't infiltrate the Soviets or improve the rocket shields?

Especially since things like that are only bottlenecked by money and Manhattan can literally shit gold.

>I’m pretty sure it outright states in the movie (if not I know it does in the book) that Manhattan can only stop a certain portion of the missiles.
it's speculation of the us officials, he probably could but
>Also manhattan isn’t “God” he’s a dude who pretty much got put in god’s shoes and his whole story arc is basically him coming to terms with it
this is basically the reason he isn't some logical supercomputer, he is slowly losing his humanity, that's his character arch, he doesn't really do shit by his own account, all his actions are decided by others because he is lost within the god powers and being a human
the whole dialogue with comedian and the killed pregnant woman is about this, manhattan has disassociated himself from everything because his god side is so much above everything but his human side can't deal with the moral ramifications of him picking sides being a living god
the only reason he does the shit he does because the women he loves are his only contact to humanity what keeps him content as a human

>It's literally not; Americans have always tried to avoid boots on the ground, whether it was using foreign fighters, nuclear weapons, or drones. You're a fucking idiot.
You clearly know nothing of history. If you just got out of burger primary school I understand. But every war has been fought with boots on the ground, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Drone warfare is a recent invention and it's not used exclusively. Out current Secretary of Defense is very much in favor of ground-force strategy, he has gone on record supporting it.

>Whereas Ozzy simply forgets to cover his tracks, not use company employees, or to choose a password more secure than "1234"
This is literally all deliberate. Do you think a guy named Ozymandias would really pick a password as obvious as, I don't know, his fucking name in another language (Ozymandias is derived from the Greek for Rameses II) , unless he deliberately wanted it exploited? He was keeping Nightowl and Rorscach busy while he executed his plan, because the last thing he needed was them showing up for beers on the evening of.

You profanity-laced response suggests I have touched a nerve. I will offer you a mea culpa though: I was wrong, one point is beyond rebuttal:
>Blue guy stops caring about the love of his life because she gets older but some fresh tits convince him to suddenly care about Earth again.
This was certainly the most retarded point of the movie. Every Snyder movie has one.

>but he can't infiltrate the Soviets or improve the rocket shields?
he can but why the heck would he do any of hat
he is above the conflicts, he has no agenda or side in the war, the reason he sticks with US is cause his gf lives there and running errands here and there keeps them from bothering him too much and lets him hang with the grill

Please stop trying so hard to win an online argument: You know damn well that the US avoid sacrificing their own soldiers whenever they can. If they can throw a bomb instead of doing it the slow, clean way, they will. If they can just send Manhattan to be a human grenade in the Viet HQ, they'd choose that over hand-to-hand combat. Especially since the movie makes a point of the anti-war protests, which wouldn't happen if they didn't make it a dirty war.

>(Ozymandias is derived from the Greek for Rameses II)
Damn son thanks for dropping that knowledge bomb on me it's not like they said so the movie

>unless he deliberately wanted it exploited
Ah, he was merely pretending to be retarded! Just like he WANTED Rohrschach's diary to get out! Because it's so much easier to fight them all the time! That's why he also kept the Joker busy! Oh no wait, he killed him because he didn't want to be found..

@90087866
>Please stop trying so hard to win an online argument
I don't have to try, son. I have already won.

But I am done, I will not respond again. So feel free to make some snarky comments and claim victory. I gotta hit the sack.

Right:
- Rorschach
- Comedian
- Changing the squid
- Dropping the corner newsvendor subplot
Wrong:
- Dan Dreiberg (not sympathetic enough)
- Sticking too closely to the timeline of the book
- Pacing is off; it just plods along
- Rather flat characterization, doesn't make audience care about the characters

>- Changing the squid
fucking brainlets

You're all either a bunch of fucking normies, or contrarian faggots. I really can't figure it out.

The movie was a great adaptation of the comics. It was a good movie. The last thing the movie needed was another plotline about missing scientists, and an exploding squid.

Right: characters, grit/feel, blue dong.
Wrong: I can't blame Snyder, but the movie could have been even less Hollywood friendly.

Come on, that "twist" was kindergarten tier even before Moore stole it from The Outer Limits.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architects_of_Fear

Even Moore doesn't buy it, given the journal ending, and a guy like Veidt would know it wouldn't work.
Doc was already a known scary singular force. Already a punishing god figure.
He created himself. He was an American agent. But ultimately not under American control.

Just imagine him emerging from Russia or China with the same behavior shown in the movie.
You'd buy the idea that he was warning the earth to stop warring or he'd come back and fuck everything up.

Didn't see the movie, but from this clip I'll make an observation.
Didn't need music playing over the entire scene. More silence would have been effective in some parts.
Everything is too blue.

>Already a punishing god figure.
except he was indifferent and didn't punish anyone

It didn't do anything wrong as a movie but it would've been glorious for it to delve more into Rorschach's past. The movie briefly in the intro showed a line of men in his apartment waiting to fuck his whore mother but I don't think audiences really understood that whores create autists.

>The movie briefly in the intro showed a line of men in his apartment waiting to fuck his whore mother but I don't think audiences really understood that whores create autists.
Do you think it might have been possible that Rorschach was molested by pedos when he was still a kid? The comic does say the he was exposed to the worst elements of his mom's lifestyle.

The soundtrack was great with the exception of the hallelujah sex scene

>giant psychic squid hits new york on the brink of the nuclear war
>oh look our autopsy shows it's actually from earth
>hmmm i wonder if the russians may be behind this

>Come on, that "twist" was kindergarten tier even before Moore stole it from The Outer Limits.
The beauty of the ruse of Watchmen is not whether it was anticipated or not but that it establishes an undeniable and inescapable consequence for the actors choices. Complete and unavoidable annihilation is the implied consequence of disobedience. It works for the same reason mutually assured destruction works, that's precisely the point of it.

Watchmen explicitly established that there was no mutually assured destruction in the event of nuclear war and then the ruse implements it and it works, just like it has always worked and always will, because the very few individuals who would chose the end of all life on this planet are not in a position to enact their choice.

>Even Moore doesn't buy it, given the journal ending

I completely disagree with this and it ties in to what I said above. There are people who will chose the end of life over compromise because they have lost perspective and Rorschach is exactly that. There are no morally righteous characters in the story, just degrees of guilt, that's what makes it so compelling.

He cant freeze time dingus

It's possible but I can't recall a page that alludes to it.

Go take a bath, Sup Forums.

...

I mean, just putting a kid in that environment and showing no remorse for it would be a form of sexual abuse. I wouldn't be surprised if one of his mom's johns diddled him though. It would add more justification for him being so squeamish and disgusted by sex, and Moore already has a rape fetish, so.

Except the Soviets, Chinese, et al were terrified of him, so he was.

>fucking in the lotus position
based

t. Virgin

Ozzy using nukes instead of a giant monster was the good choice. Nukes fit the theme more and make more sence in the story.

Not really, anyone who has read the comic will know that the monster did make sense, as long as you picked up minor details.

But I don't blame Snyder for going the route he did because to replicate the comic ending the movie would have to be even longer and the movies length was already a problem.

>the only realistic portrayal of a mortal turned god going through phases and ending up at absolute resignation

Fucking this. Dr manhattan is the only complex realistic portrayal of a god
I wish this guy would write more about him

it failed at being a literary adaptation based on the source material.

The ending in the movie didn't make fucking sense. In comic book it was great, extaterestrial, equally threatening to both US and USSR, something both sides can finally agree upon, something that neither side can blame on the other, something beyond them. The movie fucked this up, by replacing aliens with Dr Manhattan, wich is complete bullshit. He is american (the name DUH), he is product of american science, for years he was used by the american goverment. Among other big cities he destroyed NY, sure. But Veids orginal (comic book) plan was to give humanity common enemy, making Manhattan said enemy shits on Veids whole charater arc, and his whole idea of uniting humanity. People would fucking hate US after 3-4 years "You know Vlad, if not for these byastards americans, all those people in moscow would still be alive, just saying".

FUCK YOU SATAN THAT SQUID WAS AWESOME! WE WERE ROBBED!

>Manhatthan was all american

So you think Russia would be like "we forgive you America for unleashing the wrath of Dr Manhattan on the world, because you're victims too in this"? Fuck no, USA would be blamed

>casting of ozy
What was wrong with Ozy? I thought he was fine.

>doesn't know what a continent is

>Wrong
Music choice
Not showing the tits of malin akerman more
Not putting a disclaimer for autist that the movie won't be a 1 to 1 recreation of the graphic novel
>Right
Everything else

it was pretty faithful to the gnovel tho, same with 300

anyone who complains about process of adaptation is dumb anyway

>wanting akermans tits
>not dans ass

u gay?

to me the scene that illustrates the failure of this adaptation is the scene where The Comedian shoots the pregnant vietnam girl.... there should have been tension in that scene, something to elevate it, instead it just passes by without any weight to it. it was shot so blandly, and delivered without any intensity, just terrible direction...

the source material was there, but the direction was terrible, no attempt at all to elevate it.

Reminder that less than a month from now there was a crazy individuals known by the police force who did a crazy terrorist attentat in N-Y.
And now you are bitching about perfectly reasonable decision in a fictionnal world.
Btw they put him in Rikers because they wanted him to get killed just like policeman will put pedophile in gen pop so they get killed
All of them comes from the source material and your inability to place yourself in a medium.
Dr manhattan is a fucking soul transitionning from human to god his psyche is all over the place and he explain it.
Listen next time and try to understand before judging

The ending is stupid as hell. You wouldn't get peace if earth thought manhattan was the culprit. He was an american weapon regardless of who he attacked.

It also missed the fucking point, while also losing a good callback towards comic history. If they thought the ending was "dumb" then they shouldn't have made the movie at all.

They didn't understand the damn thing to begin with. Anyone who says the movie ending is better outs themselves as a lackwit who cannot fathom or understand metaphor.

>You'd buy the idea that he was warning the earth to stop warring or he'd come back and fuck everything up.


Here's the thing, I read an earlier draft of the script and this was explicitly the idea.
Veidt actually sends a transmission to the entire world (pretending it's a telepathic message) pretending to be Dr Manhattan telling the earth to clean up it's act or else he'll smite them. Really playing up the "God" angle.

In the final film, it's a little more subtle, with laurie mentioning people thinking Jon is "watching over them"

>what this movie did right
Final extended cut was pretty close to original I guess
>what it did wrong
First, it tried to adapt something that worked best as a graphic novel due to it's plot and structure.
Second, it made an action film out of drama. In comic only Dr. Manhattan had any sort of power (which is important for overall theme of the story and his character). Everyone else was sperg in Halloween costumes. In the movie suddenly everyone can break legs and fights like it's fucking Mortal Kombat video-game. Visually it may recreate comic well, but the atmosphere, story and message were ruined thanks to those small, but impactufl, touches.

It was before the paradigm shifted to thicc ass
I was still a tit guy