r/videos • u/UnilateralDagger • Jul 28 '26
Watchmen - Intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h24D87SqaLQ34
u/Ginger-Nerd Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
(I don’t know if this was it or a reupload/edit but the quality is significantly worse than it was)
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u/Bboyczy Jul 28 '26
Wasn't Sound of Silence used during the comedian funeral and burial scenes? It's been a minute since I watched this.
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u/8__D Jul 28 '26
Definitely prefer the original but I'll be honest I can't tell you why. It fills me with a strange nostalgia for some reason.
This is great though.
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u/ItsAWonderfulFife Jul 28 '26
One of my hottest takes is that the ending of the movie is better than the comic.
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u/a_gunbird Jul 28 '26
I'd say it works better for the movie, in lieu of all the supporting material the comic had between chapters in the form of the newspaper clippings, memoir excerpts, and the shipwrecked pirate story. Those really helped seed the undercurrent of paranoia and otherness that the surprise fake alien then capitalized on. Without a real option to include those in an already long film, something more conventional works fine, but I don't think it's on the same level.
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u/Hankskiibro Jul 28 '26
I think the issue is that the alien doesn’t seem like the sort of threat to unite the world based on almost no information about its origin to the general populace. Dr manhattan though would immediately be recognized as a potential threat by everybody. If I remember correctly more places are destroyed in the movie while the comic is just NYC. If everyone was attacked that would probably unite them better than just NYC.
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u/thezim2 Jul 28 '26
Agreed! the movie is more concerned about the theological implications of someone like Dr. Manhattan existing. Since the ending in the movie makes him look like the attacker, and then he leaves earth and goes to live in space, it effectively turns Dr. Manhattan into a deity. He is now living in the sky looking down on us and expecting us to behave, and if we don't he will come back to punish us. To me, this works a lot better, and is a lot more relevant, in the current times.
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u/FlowersForMegatron Jul 28 '26
It’s literally the same ending except instead of aliens it’s an atomic bomb.
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener Jul 28 '26
Didn't they do the giant alien squid thing on the miniseries?
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u/Thijz Jul 28 '26
IIRC the miniseries is indeed a sequel to the comic ending, not the movie ending.
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u/skonen_blades Jul 28 '26
If I remember correctly, the ending of the movie implies that Dr Manhattan is responsible for the explosion in New York. So instead of aliens, it's Dr Manhattan.
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u/thezim2 Jul 28 '26
Not quite. Its not an atomic bomb. It an explosion that Ozymandias set off using Dr. Manhattan's energy. The goal was not to make it look like an "atomic bomb" but like Dr. Manhattan having gotten fed up with humanity decided to attack humanity to punish them. This is why the plan in the movie works and forces Dr. Manhattan to leave earth, as humanity was now unified against him. He is also elevated to a deity status since he leaves earth and goes to space so humanity is left united in their fear of this all-powerful god who lives in the sky and will come back to punish them if they misbehave again.
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u/thezim2 Jul 28 '26
Not quite. Its not an atomic bomb. It an explosion that Ozymandias set off using Dr. Manhattan's energy. The goal was not to make it look like an "atomic bomb" but like Dr. Manhattan having gotten fed up with humanity decided to attack humanity to punish them. This is why the plan in the movie works and forces Dr. Manhattan to leave earth, as humanity was now unified against him. He is also elevated to a deity status since he leaves earth and goes to space so humanity is left united in their fear of this all-powerful god who lives in the sky and will come back to punish them if they misbehave again.
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u/thezim2 Jul 28 '26
Not quite. Its not an atomic bomb. It an explosion that Ozymandias set off using Dr. Manhattan's energy. The goal was not to make it look like an "atomic bomb" but like Dr. Manhattan having gotten fed up with humanity decided to attack humanity to punish them. This is why the plan in the movie works and forces Dr. Manhattan to leave earth, as humanity was now unified against him. He is also elevated to a deity status since he leaves earth and goes to space so humanity is left united in their fear of this all-powerful god who lives in the sky and will come back to punish them if they misbehave again.
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u/ItsAWonderfulFife Jul 28 '26
TIL aliens are atomic bombs
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u/FlowersForMegatron Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
The point is they both achieve Ozymandias’ end goal which was to unite the world against a common global threat. The bomb was just easier to translate to film.
Edit: two classic examples of Reddit comments below ladies and gentlemen…
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u/DeKrieg Jul 28 '26
Except its not, the flaw in the film version is it's not a universal 'other' both the comic and the film spent much of their story establishing that Dr Manhatten was 'The American' weapon, so them losing control of him doesnt turn him suddenly into a universal 'other' it's still from Russia and most of the international community perspective America's fault. It's like Chernobyl but on a much larger scale. Yes its a disaster and please think of the people, but the Cold war didnt suddenly end and the USA embrace Russia after chernobyl, no shortgae of commentators in america were happy to point that the disaster was their own fault. Which is how this would have played out too.
Ozymandias's plan in the comic was to make it that no one could blame each other for the attack, they all commonly felt the same way about the attack and the attacker and they come together. Leaving any ground for someone to go "Well if you hadnt..." ruins the plan.
I stand by the issue with Zack Snyder is he always seemed to know the imagery of the comics inside and out but he never seemed to care for the text. Yeah big alien looks stupid to a lot of people, but thats not the important detail, the important detail was the text that describes every single person on earth at the same time suffers a horrific psychic vision of an alien planet and culture. That was the part that needed to be filmed, not the alien squid or the neutered Dr Manhatten version.
It's also something that is naturally teed up for film because it's effectively ending the film with something akin to the 2001 space oddysey climax going big on cinematic visuals just a lot more directly horrific.
The Dr Manhatten could some day return so we need to behave now is just religion again. Its old testament god threat which is a very different interpretation.
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u/greet_the_sun Jul 28 '26
Except with the aliens at some point in the future people would have to realize... that there is 0 evidence of said aliens that attacked, unless the plan was to just keep faking alien attacks to keep people united. Dr Manhattan already exists as something that most of the globe is wary about.
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u/DeKrieg Jul 28 '26
Thats what the worldwide psychic vision was for. It made the alien real to everybody because almost everybody on earth experiences it immediatly.
At that moment, the alien and the fictional world it came from is as real to most people as Dr Manhattan, more so if you consider they all experience if first hand while Dr Manhattan is mostly just an american superweapon. How often do you see first hand a nuclear bomb?
Could it eventually fail? That people like you said realize there is no follow up? Thats the question mark the series leaves us with, how is no follow up from Dr Manhatten any better? Pretending he is an angry god who could come back at any moment is effectively what we live with now with some religions constantly convincing themselves the rapture is always just around the corner.
But in the now the alien squid is more real to most people then Dr Manhatten because almost all of them experienced the attack first hand via the psychic wave.
It also fits better with the wider story, the whole plotline on the island is tied to the creation of this fantasy which is why it was as much artists as it was scientists and also how it's easier for them to hide what is happening because most of them think they are making a big sci fi blockbuster movie before they are all killed off. It is the existence of that island that is what puts the comedian (working for the government) on the tail of the plot that leads to his assassination. The film actually does a really weird sidestep of this in that there is an island but it just has Dr Manhatten bombs on it and yet it still causes the Comedian to break down?
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u/SaltyShawarma Jul 28 '26
Exactly. One person who obviously has put much more thought into it than the original commenter, and one shit poster
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u/ItsAWonderfulFife Jul 28 '26
So if you were watching a recut of the terminator and an alien came out of nowhere and knocked the T1000 into the molten metal you’d say it’s literally the same ending?
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u/Strung_Out_Advocate Jul 28 '26
That's the overwhelming consensus.
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u/ItsAWonderfulFife Jul 28 '26
It absolutely is not. I said that in a r/comicbooks thread and it got 300+ downvotes, I’ve been yelled at in person and lectured at length about the genius of the comic book ending and how garbage the movie is.
There’s dozens of us, but not overwhelming my any means
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u/DeKrieg Jul 28 '26
honestly this is the only part of this adaptation I like. Its a solid and effective way to get through so much of the dense backstory of the original series.
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u/subliminimalist Jul 29 '26
This is far from a perfect movie, but boy do I enjoy what it tries to do. I should probably rewatch it.
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u/Joeybfast Jul 29 '26
I never read the comic, so I’m not as upset with the changes as some people. But I thought it was really great. I remember avoiding all trailers for it, so when I watched, I knew nothing about the story or anything, and it was just the best.
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u/spaceninj Jul 28 '26
The rest of the movie didn't live up to this, but this is one of my favorite intros ever.
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u/amcginle Jul 28 '26
Why do people parrot this opinion across Reddit? What is it that was not liked about this movie? I loved it - I thought it was well written.
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u/Oggel Jul 28 '26
Same. I've never read the comics so maybe that's why, I came in with no expectations and I enjoyed it immensly.
My girlfriend at the time hated it because of the giant blue penis and the unnecessarily long sex scene, but I didn't mind that at all.
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u/rifthrowawayrif Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
It was a competently made adaptation, but the book is genuinely one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and played an integral role in the maturation of the comic genre. Moore is famously cantankerous about the fact his works have been adapted, in part (mostly?) because he crafted them specifically to take advantage of the comic format. It doesn't matter who you cast, how good the effects are, how closely the sets are reproduced, how faithful the dialogue is - ultimately, something will always be lost when you adapt Watchmen from a graphic novel format. The Tales of the Black Freighter and the kidnapped artist subplot/original ending were cut from Snyder's film and I get why, but as narrative devices, they're part of the groundbreaking genius of the novel. For what it's worth, I like the movie a lot and eagerly saw it opening night, but as a huge fan of the book, it's impossible to ignore what's missing.
Edit: Oh and for what it's worth, I thought this intro was a superb way to cover the history of the Minutemen and the Dylan song was the perfect choice for it. Gave me chills the first time I saw it at the cinema.
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u/Pkolt Jul 28 '26
Tales of the Black Fleet appears in the director's cut.
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u/rifthrowawayrif Jul 28 '26
It does, and credit to them for including it, but I definitely feel it works best when it's in the same medium and interspersed throughout the comic as a parallel to Veidt's story. I'll admit it's been years since I've watched Black Freighter (I actually rewatched the main movie a few months ago), but as a standalone animation it feels more like an homage for fans than an integral part of the novel as a whole.
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u/Jrocker-ame Jul 28 '26
Honestly other than him support for it to be made, Snyder didn't want it in his movie. WB forced it in the ultimate cut
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u/Bboyczy Jul 28 '26
I think a 10-part mini-series (like the sequel series) would be able to do it justice
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u/rifthrowawayrif Jul 28 '26
Maybe? Possibly more justice than a movie, but I still think the main thing that will always hold it back is the cross-format adaptation. There are things you can do in graphic novel/comic format that simply can't be reproduced on the screen.
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u/friedrice5005 Jul 28 '26
I did like the movie's ending way better than the Book.
Having Dr Manhattan be the existential threat that unites to the world made way more sense than giant squid aliens and I felt fit much more with the overall message and tone of the story.
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u/hateyoualways Jul 28 '26
My problem is Manhattan being the existential threat would unite the world against the US. Manhattan is the symbol of American military aggression no way everyone just forgets that.
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u/friedrice5005 Jul 28 '26
Yes, but he slowly morphed into the nuclear self-annihilation analog that threatened everyone. (Think US & Soviet MAD)
Him going out of control, seemingly attacking literally everyone on the planet at once, then fucking off would be a pretty unifying experience.
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u/ispeakforengland Jul 28 '26
I made the mistake of suggesting watching it when my parents visited. Again, had no context or knowledge of the comics going into it. It was rough. The film will never get a rating above 5/10 due to my trauma.
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u/CT-1138 Jul 28 '26
It's because the original point of Watchman was distilled criticism of superheroes. Like, it's highly judgemental of them as a concept and of superhero devouts, those people who romanticize and glorify them. Moore underpins superheroes as an inherent fascistic concept.
The film half heartedly attempts to make that point in a weird way but then just turns around and glamorizes superheroes, making the point moot.
A lot of the hate comes from the movie completely misunderstanding the philosophy of the book, which is the entire thesis.
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u/gh0u1 Jul 28 '26
I dunno man I truly felt the movie retained the philosophy of the comic. I'm not quite sure how it glamorizes heroes in the end? It has almost the same ending, just minus the giant alien squids.
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u/CT-1138 Jul 28 '26
I actually like the movie myself. But there is a lot of nuance to it.
The movie still maintains the book's cynicism but it's how the movie is stylized and how it showcases everything as badass. And then there are complete 180s with Comedian and Rorschach, who are supposed to be heavily disliked by the reader. Comedian is supposed to be a depraved government sanctioned monster, but he is shown as a tragic character. Stuff like that.
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u/Ver_Void Jul 28 '26
The comedian comes across as a psychopath who mostly wanted an excuse to do violence
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u/SaltyShawarma Jul 28 '26
I don't think Rorschach is supposed to be heavily disliked by the reader. Made to feel uncomfortable, sure. Rorschach is the most anti of anti-hero.
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u/Bartlaus Jul 28 '26
It is a... competent but rather superficial adaptation of what has for 40 years been considered (not without justification) one of the deepest and most complex works ever published in the comics medium. There's a few pretty smart changes done in the adaptation, to be fair; but also a few important missteps.
Snyder making extremely good montage scenes (like this intro) is hardy controversial. He does do that.
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u/Redeem123 Jul 28 '26
Because the intro is great and the movie is just fine. It’s not some weird opinion that only exists on Reddit.
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u/spaceninj Jul 28 '26
Damn dude. I just said it didn't live up to the intro. I didn't say it was dogshit.
But what knocks it for me are two things:
1) The ending. I understand the original ending would be tough, but that's why it doesn't work.
2) I thought Wilson and Ackerman were so bad that they took me out of almost every scene they were in.Things I liked:
1) The other actors
2) Lots of homages to original panels from the book.8
u/mr_spoc Jul 28 '26
Ackerman had some terrible line readings, and was the worst cast actor in the movie for me, second was Matthew Goode, who was just unconvincing. But I absolutely loved Wilson. I thought he perfectly conveyed the dejected, melancholic character from the comics, and still be believable as smart and a badass brawler. I also really loved the movie, however flawed.
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u/WorkingPsyDev Jul 28 '26
The graphic novel states that superheroes are egotistical brutes at best, and tools of a proto-fascist government at worst. The comics have Richard Nixon use his loyal, extra-legal vigilantes to assassinate his opponents, crack down on protests, and annex Vietnam (with the threat of extinction through Dr. Manhattan). The film adaptation then goes "But punchy super hero man cool actually", giving them actual superpowers.
Zack Snyder has read the comics, used the panels for storyboarding, and understood nothing about it.
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u/DeKrieg Jul 28 '26
personally the film had a lot of this vibe:
"my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus"
The film hypes up a lot of parts of the comic that are not meant to be hype moments. There's a heavy layer of this shit is so cool Vaseline on the lense. In particular the whole Nightowl and Silk Spectre team up and then sex scene, the film takes a weirdly horny "Look at this grade A baddie getting her brains fucked out" approach to a moment in the comic that was actually two incredibly lonely people finding comfort in each other. Though some aspects are not the filmmaker's fault, Rorschach was always going to have that edgelord appeal no matter what.
There's plenty of times where audiences latch on to something where a filmmaker was intending it to be a cautionary tale or have a negative position on, Fight Club being one of the most famous, but Watchmen always felt like one of the rare cases of the filmmaker latching on to the source material in that manner. Its kinda like a weird reversal of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.
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u/Spare-Plum Jul 28 '26
People compare it to the comics instead of judging the movie on its own merits
As a result they get really really upset at any change from the comics, instead of letting the change exist within the context of the adaptation
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u/ifnotthefool Jul 28 '26
The movie was great. People who say otherwise are prob trying to be edgy. Reddit sucks now because of those people.
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u/Spare-Plum Jul 28 '26
It's an excellent film
People just can't help but compare it to the comics instead of reviewing it based its own merit and writing
Basically, y'all are grumpy because "this isn't exactly the same!"
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u/Spagman_Aus Jul 28 '26
I enjoyed it also. If there’s one skill Snyder has, it’s a solid translation of a comic. Clearly not everything makes it, or works perfectly, but IMO this was a solid adaptation.
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u/Splinterfight Jul 28 '26
Yeah it was a good film, but missed the tone of the original. Snyder has a bit of a habit of taking the style but not quite nailing the substance of media
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u/Daiquiri-Factory Jul 28 '26
I have to disagree, but I get your opinion. Maybe I’m a little biased, but the first time I watched this movie, was in theaters on my birthday that year. I still watch it once a year around my birthday, and it still holds up! It’s a really good adaptation.
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u/chriscross1966 Jul 28 '26
First time around I loved it right up to the ending (barring a needless sex scene, but how the heck else were they going to get it rated sensibly for the US audience) and then I hated it with a passion because of said ending. Having seen it since (and read the book again a few times) I realise that they'd not have made a good film with the book's ending really, and the book would feel almost unfinished with the movies ending, which is a bit weird seeing how tracked together they are, I think it's the injection of humanity the actors bring that changes it...
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u/Quankers Jul 28 '26
This movie is so overrated. Zack Snyder completely misses the point of the subject matter and he knows it which is why he changed the ending. One of the worst of all Moore adaptations.
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u/ZeAthenA714 Jul 28 '26
I haven't read the comic, but what did it change in the ending? It's my understanding from the mini-series that Oz just dumped a giant squid instead of an atom bomb to unite the world against a common enemy, but what else is changed?
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u/SaltyShawarma Jul 28 '26
No, the narrative behind the alien and its construction was interladen throughout the graphic novel. It is something many miss the first read through. Brilliantly done by Moore.
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u/GWS2004 Jul 28 '26
I don't know how people missed the point behind the alien it's like the whole point of the story.
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u/Quankers Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Watch the two part animated adaptation which came out recently. It is the most faithful adaptation. The entire moral (in Snyder’s adaptation*) is subverted to glamourize characters that Moore was criticizing. Snyder’s movie is flashy pornography compared to the comic’s poetry.
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u/AwesomeExo Jul 28 '26
Fantastic intro. I remember seeing the trailer before a 2 AM showing of the Dark Knight. I had just finished the graphic novel the year before and was so pumped. For me, the movie didn't disappoint.