Zack Snyder Responds to WATCHMEN Ending Criticism

Credit: Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Legendary Pictures.

Film: Watchmen

(via Facebook).

"Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon."

If you haven't read the graphic novel, you'd probably be better off not knowing how it ends. Zack Snyder and company took some liberties in presenting a much different version of the final scene.



Warning: From here on out, there may be spoilers. Read at your own risk!

In the 2009 film, Ozymandias' machine creates a field of energy and transports it over New York, thereby wiping the whole city. In the book, however, things were a little more wild. Instead of a nuclear blast, there was a giant squid, which was used as a hoax alien attack to unify the political powers of the world at that time. But it's not this mild moderation that's the focus here.



Recently, it was revealed what previously considered for the director's job Terry Gilliam (The Zero Theorem) had in mind for the ending. We're talking about the actual final scene, in which a reporter finds Rorschach's journal, years after the explosion that put an end to the Cold War era.



Thanks to the website i09, we now have a front row seat to Zack and Terry's own "Cold War." Here is what Gilliam had planned:

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If you'll recall, producer Joel Silver explained that Gilliam was going to have Ozymandias convince Dr. Manhattan to erase his own existence, which would have altered reality and somehow turned the "real" events of Watchmen into a comic. Specifically:

So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they're all of the sudden in Times Square and there's a kid reading a comic book. They become like the people in Times Square dressing up like characters as opposed to really BEING those characters. There's a kid reading the comic book and he's like, "Hey, you're just like in my comic book."

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[via i09]

Zack Snyder (well, his wife) fired back and joked that Gilliam might have smoked crack. Zack says that he is very happy with the ending, whereas Terry's version sounded "completely insane:"

"

Yeah, the fans would have stormed the castle on that one. So, honestly, I made "Watchmen" for myself. It's probably my favorite movie that I've made. And I love the graphic novel and I really love everything about the movie. I love the style. I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.

And that's the problem with genre. That's the problem with comic book movies and genre. And I believe that we've evolved — I believe that the audiences have evolved. I feel like "Watchmen" came out at sort of the height of the snarky Internet fanboy — like, when he had his biggest strength. And I think if that movie came out now — and this is just my opinion — because now that we've had "Avengers" and comic book culture is well established, I think people would realize that the movie is a satire. You know, the whole movie is a satire. It's a genre-busting movie. The graphic novel was written to analyze the graphic novel — and comic books and the Cold War and politics and the place that comic books play in the mythology of pop culture. I guess that's what I'm getting at with the end of "Watchmen" — in the end, the most important thing with the end was that it tells the story of the graphic novel. The morality tale of the graphic novel is still told exactly as it was told in the graphic novel — I used slightly different devices. The Gilliam version, if you look at it, it has nothing to do with the idea that is the end of the graphic novel. And that's the thing that I would go, "Well, then don't do it." It doesn't make any sense.

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[via i09]

What do you think? Which ending sound better to you?

Posted in: Current Affairs