Watchmen: The End is Nigh

Well, the original script I read had the bad guy dying and the good guy riding off into the sunset with the girl in his arms. You know, the sort of Hollywood ending you'd expect. But the first thing that Zack said to me when I met him was 'Don't worry, that character doesn't die' and he knew that was the key to it, that the ending had to be ambiguous. A lot of people seem very attached to the giant squid that turns up at the end of the comic - that isn't a problem for me, as long as the emotional message at the end of the story is the same and it's left open-ended. On the last cut of the movie I saw, that was certainly the case.

Well, I mean he clearly is off his rocker, this was not news to me. But we just knew we needed to have some big un-earthly thing turn up in the middle of New York, and it sort of looks like a squid, but it sort of isn't, it's meant to be a sort of nightmare-ish multi-dimensional sexual beast. But I can understand why they wouldn't want to put that in the movie, it might be a bit of a leap too far for the audiences. But it was always the way we intended to end it, there are lots of clues all the way through the comic.

Yeah, but the key point is, it doesn't matter if it's an act of terrorism or a giant squid from space, the threat has to come from outside. Apparently when Reagan met Gorbachev to sort out the end of the Cold War, he suggested to Mikhail that an alien invasion might be just the thing to pull everyone together. Of course the irony of 9/11 is that it did pull everyone together - just not for very long. But I'm getting all political now...