Are you kidding me, Paul?! The ending of Watchmen is fantastic, and this coming from someone who hates bad endings to good stories. I'm curious as to what you dislike, because I thought the ending to the comic was just the right mixture of hope and despair.

It's the Asperger syndrome that closes their minds to the slightest change in their favorite book.

Don't like the new frame up of Dr. M ending. I don't necessarily think filmmakers have to produce completely faithful versions of books, but c'mon. Keep the squid.

Would absolutely LOVE to hear what Mr. Constant finds "weak" about the ending of The Watchmen.

really? advance screening audiences made of comic book geeks don't like it? i'm sure they're rushing to reshoot.

They frequently reshoot the endings to movies when they don't test well with audiences.

Maybe they didn't like the original ending, as max said?

Hey, a new ending improved "The Scarlet Letter", I'm sure it'll work wonders here.

I loved The Watchmen graphic novel (which I just finally read this summer after decades of friends urging me to do so), but hated the ending. However, given that so much of the labrynthine plot drives toward that conclusion, I imagine that they'd have to do a pretty clever "re-imagining" to come up with an ending that properly wrapped up the thematic and action elements of the story! I could live without the stupid squid, though.

I was hoping that the lack of squid was some type of psyche out. That it will somehow appear in the released version.

It's a great ending...what did you want; a big confrontation leading to the "villain" getting his just desserts?

It's a very Moorian ending; ambiguous but with a lot of potential.

Honestly, the squid would be really hard to bring over to the film, being that it relates to the comic within the comic. Making Dr Manhattan the scapegoat for destroying cities instead of some unknown aliens makes complete scene in the context of a film.

As long as we still get mass destruction in the end, then the meaning and awesomeness of the story are not lost.

whoa! just read what the change was and I'm majorly irritated...all the strands/storylines in the book lead up to that ending; how the fuck can they change it without changing the entire book?

no wonder Alan Moore is permanently pissed off about the movie adaptations of his work.

9/11 and the aftermath forged from it by Cheney and Rove forever ruined the ending of Watchmen. I honestly feel sorry for anyone who didn't read the graphic novel by 9/10/01. It's impossible to appreciate outside of its original context, which was, although it didn't seem so at the time, a hell of a lot more innocent.

I wish the movie had been made when it should have been made, because I don't believe you can use the original ending now and I don't believe any other ending would work. I'll still see it for the pretty costumes and the nostalgia. If the ending really doesn't work, I'll get over it.

But, oh, what might have been.

A squid attack is just too close to the horrible truth about giant squid and the threat their preternatural intelligence poses to humanity. The squid hate us all, and they will see every last one of us dead unless we get them first. It had to be changed to something, anything, but squid to keep it in the realm of the fantastic.

Nobody, not me, not you, wants to go to the movies to dwell upon what the giant squid are capable of. What they could be planning right now. They're out there now as we speak; isn't that enough? Isn't it?

and thats why you're a (*cough*) critic and not a writer Paul

The connections of the squid to "The Black Freighter" are not such that you *need* the comic-within-a-comic storyline to make it work within the context of the movie.

The connection's strength was in the artists and scientists Blake discovers on the island, what that revelation does to him and how his discovery leads to his murder (thus starting the whole "Mask Killer" theory).

If one can accept that they'll tie this "new squid" into the story of the movie in a similar way, i.e. Blake discovers the scheme behind the story and that kicks things off, then I guess it can work.

I'm alright with a post-911 modernization of the story so long as the spirit of the thing stays true.

What's more disturbing than the removal of the squid, however, is the alleged removal of the last scene at the offices of the New Frontiersman.

But, I guess we get to make up our own minds about it come March . . .

Post-911 modernization? As the novel is set in an alternate reality, 9/11 would never have happened.

You would change the "spirit" completely by updating it to anything close to present day, greatly reducing tension of the Soviet/US confrontation and the changes in U.S. politics post-Vietnam.

@17 From what I've read, the movie is set in the same year as the graphic novel, which is 1985. So its an alternate reality that hasn't reached 9/11/01 yet. But, yeah, that day almost certainly wouldn't have happened in that reality as it did in ours, though, given the events as portrayed in 1985.

I'm OK with the giant squid not being in the story. I don't think it was a bad final act, just a rather weak one, as compared to the rest of the story. It was the spirit of the thing -- and act that makes everyone realize the Cold War was stupid and that there are bigger things to be worried about -- that was important. It sounds like this new ending pulls the same thing off but with a more practical angle.

I agree with #16 above that leaving out the very final scene, at the offices of the New Frontiersman, is actually worse. That short bit is what unravels everything that's gone on throughout the book, for good or bad. It's also the bittersweet ending that makes the entire thing so memorable.

The end is kind of central to the whole theme of the book. Whatever, it's just a cash cow anyway nerd nerd nerd bitch bitch bitch.