In hindsight: did removing the squid really help this movie?

[ClarkLuther55]

People complained about the movie being long as it was. Adding in a half hour subplot of people on an island and missing scientists would've just made that worse.

The squid needed to go.

The foreshadowing of Adrian's plans was never the focus of the comic before the big reveal. They had Bubastis (who was still pointlessly left in the movie), and a few brief newspaper clippings with that wacky right-wing tabloid that Rorschach liked.

All they needed to do was mention missing artists on the TV that Blake was watching in the beginning, drop in one line about Bubastis being genetically engineered, and show a few headlines from that tabloid (newspaper headlines were a technique Snyder used a lot anyway, but for other things). Maybe have Rorschach drop in a line or two about psychics or missing scientists in the beginning (among seemingly irrelevant crap like the "dead dog in alley"), which most of the audience would initially dismiss as paranoid conspiracy theorist ranting.

 

[iceberg325]

No, it didn't IMO. Here are my reasons:

1. Watchmen is a superhero story. An extremely dark and dysfunctional deconstruction of the genre that straddles the line between a full superhero story and "what would they be like in real life," but the scifi/fantasy elements were still there. The squid made the story more fantastical and interesting, which is the kind of thing I like to see when I read these kinds of stories.

2. Bubastis is pointless without the squid. She was another little scifi element, that served the story by foreshadowing what Adrian was capable of. In the movie, she just shows up without a word of explanation. I've heard that moviegoers were confused as to what the hell Bubastis was supposed to be. Saying that the squid was too hard for people to grasp makes no sense if you're going to retain Adrian's weird mutant lynx.

3. Removing the squid took out one of the comic's most disturbing and powerful moments. The scene depicting the piles of corpses filling New York's streets had far more impact than the bloodless and sterile nuking in the movie. Which is really strange, because Snyder clearly likes to show blood and guts and made several other scenes far gorier than they were in the original comic.

4. Adrian's plan doesn't make as much sense without the squid. In the comic, they explained that artists were hired to come up with disturbing things (sights, sounds, ideas) that would be broadcasted in the psychic shockwave and traumatize the survivors. This served to flesh out the "alien threat" so that people would understand what had "actually" happened.

The squid represented a powerful, but clearly mortal threat to the Earth. The ideas that it sent out would allow people to think that they could actually unite and fight the aliens. Dr. Manhattan, on the other hand, is a freaking god with the destructive power of entire nuclear arsenals. In the movie Adrian actually leads people to believe that he had wiped out not just New York, but capitals and major cities across the world. There is no fighting Dr. Manhattan; if he goes rogue then it's GAME OVER. Adrian's plot as depicted in the movie would have more likely caused a breakdown of society.

Your second point made about the Lynx is exactly what I was going to post. Im sure some people questioned why the Lynx was there in the 1st place. Taking the squid out, IMO, takes away from Ozzys character.

I didnt hate the movie ending. I just feel a movie like the Watchmen was a bold movie. Its took the essence of the book and made it into a great film. But why half ass it? Why not take the adaptation as it is? 300 was such a great film because it followed the book so closely. Watchmen should have done the same.

 

[The Dark Defender]

I do think seeing city streets filled with blood corpses would've been more powerful than just a big blue explosion...but I liked the idea of Jon taking the blame himself rather than a giant squid that everyone thinks is a space monster. That just always struck me as rather silly.

 

[블라스]

Screw the squid.

 

[chaseter]

How would a giant psychic squid help make the general audience like this film better, which would in turn give it more success??????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I thought the movie was fine. The squid was the dumbest thing that was in the novel anyways. The movie still made Dr. Manhattan leave Earth and the movie still had Ozymandias as the mastermind of a plan to stop war.

 

[Raiden]

I think while I ended up liking the change more than I thought I would before I saw the movie, the biggest problem I had with this change is that it made Dr. Manhattan the culprit in public's eyes, made Bubastis' existence practically useless, and it removes the unknown threat that would've made this worldwide peace more believable. Also, it also eliminated the conversation between Dr. Manhattan and Ozy at the end, when Manhattan omniously said that it "never ends". It just sounded so weightless when it was Silk Spectre II who said this famous line. But that's the way it is.