One time someone else asked me if I was a god…
Me: I told them, I don’t think there is a god. And if there is I’m nothing like him.
You crack me up, little buddy.
Jon, if someone asks if you are a god, you say YES!!!
He couldn’t help it. That answer just… popped into his head.
Jon’s gone bye-bye now.
Sorry, I just popped off to Mars to wax philosophical. I got bored of not having any life around, plus the martian dirt chafed my giant blue wang.
Funny, I thought based upon previous viewings you were already complete waxed.
Just saw the film. Short version of my rant: it was rubbish. Bad in so many ways it would be tedious and unpleasant to try to recount them all. As an adaptation of an Alan Moore comic, I’d rate it below “From Hell” and “V for Vendetta”, despite both of those also being seriously bad adaptations. (Well, to be fair, “From Hell” is alright on its own terms, it just doesn’t bother trying to be an adaptation of Moore’s book.)
No reason to read further.
Could you be any less lucid?
I’m always working on it. ;)
I was thinking about the ending of the comic - Veidt has the technology to genetically engineer a monstrous squid, imbue it with psychic powers, and teleport it into the middle of New York, but apparently nobody else in the world save Dr. Manhattan does? I think the advent of teleportation and the creation of psychic creatures is as big a story as the threat of nuclear war, but it’s kind of glanced over. I think the movie’s ending makes more sense since it removes these issues.
Do…huh? The ending in the comic book is Veidt implying that alien invader squids from another dimension are coming to kill us all. Nobody but the people in the room with him when he explained his evil crafty plan would have known from whence it came. Regular people would think that there’s just some badass squid monsters roving the astral plane and preparing to totally invade the hell out of Earth, so rather than fighting among themselves, the world’s nations ally together against this nonexistent threat.
Yeah, I can accept that. But Veidt having access to teleportation and the technology to imbue psychic powers kind of comes out of nowhere and then goes nowhere except creating the space alien.
This story just isn’t my thing. There’s a hopelessness at the centre of both the comic and the movie that I don’t buy. I don’t believe ‘human nature’, is hard coded and immobile - we have an evolutionary need to void our bowels and yet we learn toilet training - and I don’t believe it’s going to take a squid monster or nuclear attack to compel people to set aside their differences.
The systems that teach people how to behave and what to think about the world are normalized and largely invisible so people mistake learned attitudes and behaviour for ‘human nature’.
I believe that people are afraid; people run social scripts that help them to fit in; and that people will rise to the moment if you appeal to their better angels. Mostly, I find this story to be too bleak for my tastes. (I do think the movie is well mounted and executed, though. Zack Snyder has a poets eye for composition.)
Well, the story is very much mired in Cold War fatalism - I’ve certainly read other things from the same general era that had much the same feeling about them. Maybe this is a sign of the times?
I think it’s a fine point. With the resources expended to create this hoax, it seems Veidt could have created an international police and army of super soldiers to remove all nuclear weapons from the planet - or any number of less contrived solutions that the smartest man in the world might’ve come up with.
That’s fiction for ya.
I think I agree, Brian and also I’m not a comic book reader, and while thematically I think the idea of exposing super heroes as regular people in costume is very rich I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff in the spine of the story that I miss because comic books were not a part of my universe. I do think the mirroring that Dave Gibbons achieved with his artwork is amazing.
I think you have a point, but as somebody mentioned, it’s a standard trope in comics despite not making rational sense, which I think is sort of the point, since the book was working within and playing with standard comic tropes. A good counter-point is the more recent DC stuff, where Luthor runs for President, but (in one interpretation at least) intentionally loses because the power of being president would actually be a step down from his existing secret dealings.
Well, the teleportation, I believe, has to do with his working directly with Dr. Manhattan, so I can buy that nobody else has access to that technology.
The “psychic” part of the psychic squid is a little trickier, but Moore’s pretty careful with his words on that one. There’s talk of psychic “sensitives”, which I interpret more as betazoid-y “get a general sense of the other person” than a Professor X “read other person’s mind”. And he didn’t really have to make specific psychic messages, just a Cthulu-y sense of horrible horrible things.
As for the Anti-Nuclear Super Soldier Army, I think you could explain it away with Veidt’s view of human psychology, and that people have to give up (or redirect) war because they think it’s a good idea, rather than giving it up because somebody took their toys away. Basically a “make them think your idea is their idea” thing. It’s a fair point though, and I think att the end of the day you really need to just chalk it up to “comic book world, so comic book villain logic applies”, with the caveat that it was probably used ironically.
We just accept that fantasy is fantasy and the pieces don’t all have to fit together in place as long as the story is interesting or entertaining.