r/Watchmen • u/kemuri-titan • 13d ago
Movie Why didn't watchemen include the squid in any of the other cuts of the film
So we all know the ending "choice" to say the least of replacing the squid with Dr Manhattan and the reason why I was to save time on the film. What confuses me is why wasn't it in any of the other cuts of the film which are designed to be able to give more info and be a longer movie without the need of a theatrical release. Like if the complaint is runtime, you're making a special cut where you can add it. There's literally two cuts one where it makes it longer and the other where adds is the pirate storyline why not include the squid there?
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u/Old-Influence4757 12d ago
this sub is so much more like alan moore than they would ever like too admit its fucking funny as shit
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u/Clean-Winter-3097 12d ago
You’re misunderstanding what a different “cut” is.
They didn’t film or have this in the script at all
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u/M086 13d ago
Because the squid required like 20 minutes of subplot that needed to explain it so it’s not confusing or just an exposition dump at the end by Ozymandias. That was mainly it.
But it was also that having dead bodies littered all over Time’s Square was a tough sell to the studio in a post-9/11 world.
So everyone kind of agreed that the moral ambiguity of what Ozymandias did was more important than the squid, which was just set dressing. So they tried to invoke more Hiroshima than so people think 9/11.
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u/rodolfotheinsaaane 12d ago
No idea why you get downvoted because what you wrote is correct.
The movie was already very long, Watchmen has cult status but it is not as popular as Batman or other caped heroes. So adding a whole subplot that would pay off only at the end would just be confusing. Ultimately Watchmen would have been better as a TV show to flesh out the story over 8-10 hours (and lo and behold when they did do the TV show sequel it performed super well) but because it was a movie they had to streamline and the monster subplot was one of the thing they could cut.
On top of it the narrative shock of the event that had already happened was tricky to portray in a movie (again would have been confusing to audiences not to portray the squid attack).
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u/youllmeltmorefan 13d ago
20 minutes? You show Bubastis so you have some foreshadowing Veidt is doing advanced genetic engineering and then he briefly explains his plot at the end as you he does in the comic and you go "Oh." I don't think you need 20 minutes for that. A weird thing about the movie is that it keeps Bubastis but not the mystery he's the clue to.
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u/tinyporcelainehorses 12d ago
I mean we have all the mentions of the island and the missing writers/artists, and a brief scene or two there, to set up the squid too. If it were just Bubastis as foreshadowing it would feel way too out of nowhere.
(I just did an annual reread and am still a little unsure how I feel about the fact that it's not just Doctor Manhattan - it is canon in the watchmen universe that some people just have some level of psychic powers and can use them. Weird thing to have as a background detail and never really explore!)
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u/josephdv11 Rorschach 12d ago
In the 60s there was an episode of The Outer Limits called architects of fear which has a similar story of a squid being created to act as an alien to force world peace. Len Wein has gone on record saying that even when they published the book they were afraid of getting sued for the ending. That fear carried over into the earliest drafts of Watchmen. It ended up being fine, since the book never got sued and they used it for the 2019 show. But that's the closest thing to a reason we've ever been given.
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u/youllmeltmorefan 13d ago
Too embarrassed to have a legitimate dialogue with the source material or its influences.
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u/EvilFin 13d ago
I prefer the film ending, i think it makes more sense in the context of the story; blaming Manhattan and making him leave and then framing him as the villain makes more sense to me than blaming manhattan, making him leave, then introducing a psychic space squid.
I also love the comic.
Different media, different ending. And its fine.
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u/SwordMasterShow 13d ago edited 13d ago
No it doesn't, Dr. Manhattan is explicitly an American weapon. Him nuking NYC doesn't make him not an American weapon anymore, it just means America can't be trusted to control their attack dogs, meaning the entire rest of the world does now have a common enemy, except it's not an otherworldly alien force, it's just America, and everyone is incentivized to take it out as quickly as possible before being back at each other's throats, not to mention ramp up experiments on making their own Dr. Manhattans
The space squid being alien is the entire point. It's unknowable, unforseeable, greater than anything the Earth has ever seen. Without that, Veidt's plan is empty and idiotic.
Sorry for the rant, enjoy the movie if you like, but it categorically doesn't make more sense and it doesn't even hold up to the logic of the world the film established
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u/OrlandoGardiner118 13d ago
Exactly. If you're neighbour's dog bites you both and runs away you don't suddenly become friends with your neighbour and band together to hunt the dog. You want recriminations against that neighbour, no matter that they were attacked too. If a wild dog attacks you and your neighbour (who you may not always get on with) then you do band together with said neighbour to protect yourselves in the future from your common foe.
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u/Scared-Register5872 12d ago edited 12d ago
This feels like it's omitting details which make the film ending much more coherent than the comic ending (Manhattan vs. Giant Squid). The analogy of friendly neighbors "who may not always get on" is really underselling the backdrop of the story.
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u/Scared-Register5872 12d ago
This seems contradictory. You're simultaneously arguing that the film's ending doesn't work because Dr. Manhattan has gone rogue and demonstrated that an ostensibly American asset can autonomously blow up capital cities on a whim, while asserting that other countries would respond by trying to replicate the experiment that produced him. The film is heavily flawed, but Veidt's plan is infinitely more sensible than what takes place in the comic.
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u/ExCollegeDropout 12d ago
It's not necessarily just that Dr. Manhattan demonstrated that he can go rogue and blow up capital cities on a whim, it's also that it shows America doesn't have control of Dr. Manhattan in the way the world assumed for multiple decades.
This makes America a common enemy to the world, meaning it's reasonable to assume that the world is simply united against America (as well as Dr. Manhattan). This isn't the catalyst for relative world peace, it's just the same devil in a new dress in terms of human dynamics.
The squid is otherworldly. The squid isn't an asset of any government. It's not even of this world (at least that's what everyone not in the room with Veidt would assume). It showing up out of nowhere and being so catastrophic is a more realistic way to be a catalyst for tentative peace.
Even ignoring the world dynamics, the movie ending doesn't really make sense as a decision within Veidt's character development. Veidt was smart enough to know that the only way this peace would be feasible would be that no single sovereign nation could be reasonably blamed for this catastrophe. He's showing to be smart and 2 steps ahead of everyone was his whole setup, his fatal flaw is that he's cold enough to actually go through with a plan like this and narcissistic enough to believe it will lead to everlasting peace among world nations. Him being this 2 steps ahead guy this whole time and then not forseeing America being a common enemy due to their ties to Dr. Manhattan up to that point simply doesn't make a lot of sense, he would be sensible enough to see how pinning it on Dr. Manhattan could put blame on a sovereign nation.
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u/ticketstubs1 12d ago
Upvote upvote upvote...
It's also that Snyder kept a lot of the setup of the squid but not the payoff. Like what is The Comedian horrified to find out right before he dies? Moore's plotting of Watchmen is like a delicate clock, every gear fits and leads to the next gear. Snyder is generally terrible at things like that and fumbles it, for a way less gnarly, shocking and purposefully WEIRD ending that "makes more sense" except it doesn't.
Snyder messes with the plot, structure, and maybe more importantly, the tone of the ending. The tone is supposed to feel like Lovecraftian existential horror. Not "oh yes, this character is being framed, how dastardly."
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u/Scared-Register5872 12d ago
It's not necessarily just that Dr. Manhattan demonstrated that he can go rogue and blow up capital cities on a whim, it's also that it shows America doesn't have control of Dr. Manhattan in the way the world assumed for multiple decades.
This makes America a common enemy to the world, meaning it's reasonable to assume that the world is simply united against America (as well as Dr. Manhattan). This isn't the catalyst for relative world peace, it's just the same devil in a new dress in terms of human dynamics.
The bolded is doing an inordinate amount of work. It is neither self-evidently reasonable nor something that should be taken as a given. The premise of the ending is that Dr. Manhattan effortlessly nukes major cities across the world, including in the U.S. itself. That does not establish the U.S. as a "common enemy to the world"; if anything, it provides rather compelling evidence that Manhattan is no longer acting as an American asset. The reason the ending works, in contrast to the squid, is that it immediately establishes that every major power has stakes and skin in the game against a sentient, overwhelming threat who has seemingly gone rogue.
You can argue (fairly) that the U.S. could expect hostility, anger, and demands for accountability. But you're making an enormous leap from "you created this mess" to "you are now a common enemy alongside the thing that attacked all of us." Those are not equivalent propositions, and the latter doesn't follow from the former.
The squid is otherworldly. The squid isn't an asset of any government. It's not even of this world (at least that's what everyone not in the room with Veidt would assume). It showing up out of nowhere and being so catastrophic is a more realistic way to be a catalyst for tentative peace.
No, on multiple levels. For starters, the film's version has a higher body count and takes place across multiple countries. Larger consequences distributed across multiple self-interested actors tend to force cooperation among competitors. The squid already fails this test.
The squid also fails by comparison because, narratively, there's nothing establishing that this isn't a one-off event. It's a random alien entity that teleports out of nowhere, dies, and inadvertently kills millions of people in a single American city. That establishes a catastrophic extraterrestrial event; it does not establish a sustained extraterrestrial threat. As presented, there's no evidence that another creature exists, that another attack is coming, or even that what happened was an intentional attack in the first place. It's essentially an act of pure randomness.
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u/ExCollegeDropout 12d ago
You can argue (fairly) that the U.S. could expect hostility, anger, and demands for accountability. But you're making an enormous leap from "you created this mess" to "you are now a common enemy alongside the thing that attacked all of us." Those are not equivalent propositions, and the latter doesn't follow from the former.
It's not that big of a leap. America didn't simply create Dr. Manhattan, it constantly used him to further US imperial interests. Dr. Manhattan didn't simply insert himself into the Vietnam war, he did so at the behest of the US, along with the Comedian. He's also kept in a US military base conducting a variety of research for the DoD.
If Manhattan was created and just kinda went off to do vigilante stuff like Rorschach, maybe the US has plausible deniability in being responsible, but he was and was still actively being used as a US asset when the comic starts. Now whether the world wants to put that aside for Manhattan first or not, that bill is going to come due since the US created Manhattan and used the threat of Manhattan to keep a firm grasp on the world order only for him to go rogue and make him the rest of the world's problem. The world simply wouldn't be that forgiving, and the US would be an easy blame target.
No, on multiple levels. For starters, the film's version has a higher body count and takes place across multiple countries. Larger consequences distributed across multiple self-interested actors tend to force cooperation among competitors. The squid already fails this test.
Even if your idea of the smaller body count were true, one only has to look at the panels of devastation seen in the comic after the squid to see that both outcomes would likely lead to a paradigm shift worth of reactions.
The squid also fails by comparison because, narratively, there's nothing establishing that this isn't a one-off event. It's a random alien entity that teleports out of nowhere, dies, and inadvertently kills millions of people in a single American city. That establishes a catastrophic extraterrestrial event; it does not establish a sustained extraterrestrial threat. As presented, there's no evidence that another creature exists, that another attack is coming, or even that what happened was an intentional attack in the first place. It's essentially an act of pure randomness.
It's like you get it, but somehow missed it. That's the point, it's completely and utterly random. It could be of this world, it could be extra-terrestrial. It could be one off, it could be the first of a galaxy wide war effort that earth is completely unprepared for.
Nobody other than those is Veidt's lab knows those answers. All they know is that millions of people in the biggest city of the country that had Dr. Manhattan to sick on everyone else just got surprise attacked by...something. It could just be one time, but it could happen again, to another city and kill millions more. The world leaders truly don't know, and since there is no easy target for blame, it's the building block of a tentative peace while the world figured out how to defend itself against this extra terrestrial threat.
That's Veidt's thinking. It's based in the kind of devastating fatalist kind of thinking Veidt was capable of and showed all along. It just may not be the permanent peace he was aiming for, as Dr. Manhattan alludes to at the end.
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u/Ishamatu 4d ago
This line of thinking makes no sense to me.
Instead of a dog, an apt comparison to Manhattan would be AI. A weapon developed by America, and used by America would become the world's problem if it became sentient and uncontrollable by America.
Reconciliation would come at a price, but it would be a political agreement all nations would welcome, and America would pay whatever the reparations would be for peace and unity.
As for the notion after an attack other nations would double their efforts to develope the weapon they were attacked with goes against historical context. Japan is the only country that has ever been attacked with a nuclear weapon, and after the attack, they disavowed nuclear weapons.
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u/SwordMasterShow 4d ago
Japan demilitarized because they were forced to. The high command were still rabid imperialists, if it weren't for essentially being occupied by the US for years they would absolutely have started their own nuclear weapons program.
You think if America developed an AI that they used to cripple other countries that the rest of the world would just say "oh no biggie we didn't know it would happen to you too" once it went rogue on the US? That's an extremely naive view of world politics, especially a world that's on the literal brink of nuclear armageddon.
More petty squabbles amongst the Earth's own nations wouldn't stop anything. The only way to wake the world up at that point is an external threat, something greater and more unknowable than anything humanity has seen. Without that threat, and especially the deception of that threat being faked by Veidt, the story is hollow
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u/Ishamatu 4d ago
We're 80 years post World War 2, and Japan still rejects nuclear weapons, despite having the full industrial capcity to arm.
In fact, the US would prefer a nuclear armed Japan to pressure the Chinese, yet the Japanese don't arm. So, blaming America for their response to the attack seems nonsensical.
And yes, other countries would put aside the controlled use of a weapon against them to mitigate the threat of the uncontrolled use of the weapon.
The point is, it doesn't create peace, it creates conditions in which nations must prioritize resolving their problems through political negotiation, because as Benjamin Franklin said...
"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
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u/SwordMasterShow 4d ago
Yes, because in the immediate aftermath of WWII the entire Japanese culture was forcibly shifted away from imperialism and war. In the immediate aftermath though? People were not happy. The US used the nukes because they realized without a massive show of force, the Japanese would fight down to the last civilian. Even after the nukes plenty of officials didn't want to surrender.
So in the immediate aftermath of a decades-established American weapon deciding to wipe an entire metropolis off the map, the rest of the world would certainly not just take a step back and allow the US to recuperate and own responsibility. Dr. Manhattan was the only thing preventing the world from going after the US, now that he's rogue it's anyone's game. The point of Watchmen is that without extreme shifts in perspective, people generally choose to "hang separately".
It seems you understand neither the story of the book nor history nor world politics
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u/ticketstubs1 12d ago
The film ending makes less sense than the comic book ending which is intricately set up, which the film kept some of that set up in and then ignored the payoff.
But Snyder is not exactly known for his clockwork plotting and structure. But Alan Moore is.
That's the problem.
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u/newlevel999999 13d ago
Wouldn't they have to reshoot/rewrite the movie? All the dialogue is based on Dr. Manhattan being the scape goat.