Okay first factual problem, it wouldn't work. With the world on the very edge of nuclear war several cities exploding in mushroom clouds will not stop the war. It would in fact kick start it, at least one knee jerk reaction from an idiot would be to press the button. Bye bye world, see you glow in the dark from several light years away. If, you know, I didn't live on the irradiated lump of rock in question.
The reasoning behind Adrian's plan is severely flawed, let alone the results. With Dr Manhattan around there is no cold war. He could turn Russia's nuclear ordinance into sugar. Or custard. Even spinach for crying out loud, there is no threat here. The story is pointless.
The same faults are in the comic but can be ignored easily due to the skill of the writing. It's that skill that's lost here.
Right now on to my number one problem with the ending and take a deep breath and try to follow me here.
I mentioned in my first half that Hollis Mason was dropped from the film after one scene. I also mentioned reflections, how something in one part shed light on to something later. Both visually and literally. This is where Mason's plot comes in and is needed. In the beginning of the Watchmen comic we got chapters of his book, written after his retirement from costumed crime fighting. It's easy to ignore that to save time, there is even a whole Chapter in Watchmen devoted to these memoirs. The Director exorcised all that to save time, unfortunately this all reflects on the ending.
More specifically Rorschach's journal. We have to ask what would happen if people did read it and did believe it. With Mason's book the result was everyone knew he was the first Night Owl. This is directly responsible for his death at the hands of uninformed hooligans, who think he's the same one that has freed Rorschach.
The message is that if the book is published the uninformed and ignorant would attack. Undoing all the hard work of Adrian's masterplan. Rorschach wins, at what cost? well its steep is the only answer.
Have we won or lost by sacrificing our morals? That is the key question and it's your opinion, there is no right or wrong answer to that. Instead, with the film, we get Night Owl shouting how wrong it is to deceive humanity to save it. Saying it's a debasement. What is the point of having an ambiguous ending when you try to shoehorn a moral into the thing with a crowbar and a sledgehammer? This is the third problem. If you're just going to slavishly follow the comic with blind obedience you don't just make a left turn when the book takes a right. It's jarring, pointless and misses the point.
I know I'm sounding like a fan-boy of the comic and I am but I can't separate the two. With V for Vendetta I can accept it as a different point of view from the book. A such it becomes a different story and both can be enjoyed. You can say that the book inspired the film rather than a straight lift. The same with I Robot. It's not Asimov's work but is inspired by it. While both films weren't good as the source material they were better than you thought of them as different thing.
Not every film version of a popular book can be Lord of the Rings. If you can't follow the original with a religious fury, be it length, convoluted plot or in the case of Watchmen just being plain unfilmable put in one sentence at the beginning. "Inspired by... "
Fanboys would find the smallest problem and rant about it for days on end (as seen here) Add "inspired by " and you solve everything. You'll still get the fans but you can always smile at their rants and say the original is brilliant we want people to read it, just look at ours as well.
This is the biggest problem with converting one art form into another. You are going to change things so accept that. Don't just follow that thing like a slave and wonder why you don't do well in the box office when the only people watching know the books backward and secretly wanted something new
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