Watchmen (film)/Headscratchers

Would/Did The Manhattan-Energy Plan Work? (Spoilers)

 * The 'real' flaw is as follows: a) you have a nigh-omnipresent hero who can be multiple places at all times. b) This person can DISSASEMBLE MACHINES TO THEIR COMPONENTS AND PUT THEM BACK TOGETHER. c) This person is also immune to nuclear waste. So what does he do? He disillusions the character, alienates him from humanity and the people he loves and FRAMES HIM FOR MASS MURDER instead of having him remove all nuclear material from all the nuclear warheads, and disassemble said warheads into bicycles or something! And Ozymandias was supposed to be a 'GENIUS'?!? more like Too Dumb to Live or Nice Job Breaking It, Hero to me.
 * Don't be stupid. Dr. Manhattan isn't omnipotent. If he could do that, he would have, because he was affiliated with one side who put him through tests and the like. He can be confused by several natural things, including, by his own admission, massive electromagnetic pulses as well as tachyons.
 * Yeah. Dr. Manhattan didn't need Ozymandias to suggest something like that to him. It's strongly implied that if Dr. Manhattan just appears in a Russian missile silo and starts taking apart bombs, the Soviets will launch all their missiles- and they have so many not even he can destroy them all. We don't know how many places he can be in at once, either.
 * There are more ways to disable bombs than taking them apart in a big obvious way. If he were to teleport into a hidden place and start secretly turning all the uranium into iron, for instance.
 * This is addressed in the story. Even if he could stop many of the missiles, he couldn't stop them all. Even 1% would be enough to cause enormous damage.
 * No, that was referring to Dr. Manhattan's ability to intercept ICBMs in the air. He could try render warheads inert while they're still on the ground, however, it only takes 1 sighting of him disarming missiles to put people on alert and he doesn't know the location of every missile on earth.
 * Errr, he has godlike clairvoyance and precognition. He could easily know the location of every missile on Earth if he wanted to. The only reason he didn't do it is because he didn't see himself doing it, and Manhattan never makes any attempt to escape his fated future until the very end. It's the same reason why he didn't save that woman the Comedian shot in front of him.
 * I personally found it incredibly stupid. Nixon says something like "we will fight them, and we will prevail". Is he out of his gourd? Fight Mr. Manhattan. You might as well try to fight Q, or sue God for damages. Heck, yelling at a cloud would make about as much sense. But in the movie, they all seem blind to that fact and cooperate for no reason. In reality (and it seems that Watchmen tries to be realistic), such a peace would last days, at most, since then, with no more sitings of Dr. Manhattan, they'd realize how silly their cooperation was and go back to a Cold War, a real one with deterrances and proxy conflicts without Dr. Manhattan's supernatural intervention. It also slighted the real differences between the US and USSR, and the seriousness of the capitalist/communist split and their opposing worldviews, thinking that a little ol' Enemy Mine was going to stop all US/USSR conflict. So, Ozymandias killed millions of people for no good reason in pursuit of a truly crappy plan. In the words of Detective Del Spooner Ozymandias is "the dumbest smart person, I have ever met in my life!"
 * Right, so you think that both sides should have just decided it was hopeless and given up straight away? Dr. Manhattan is incredibly powerful, but not omnipotent - he himself says that he would "only" be able to stop about 60% of Soviet missiles if they were launched. Ozymandias, working alone, was able to come up with a plan that he believed had a chance of destroying Dr. Manhattan. It didn't work, but if he thought he could come up with a solution then the governments may just decide that all of their best scientists working together would have enough of a chance for it to be worth trying. Hell, Ozy could suggest a vague outline of his plan as something they should work on, he doesn't need to tell them it's useless.
 * Wanna bet there would've been a rash of Dr. Manhattan sightings around the world, even without Veidt's instigation? People in real life report sightings of Elvis all the time, and Elvis couldn't spontaneously appear anywhere on the planet he felt like turning up. As disproving such sightings would be effectively impossible, it's likely that governments would need at least a few years to convince themselves that they were just B.S. By then, the superpowers might've actually caught on that they can talk to one another, rather than trade threats.
 * May we burn the nonbeliever?
 * Above posters: let's keep the complaints about the movie and the book separate, shall we? Otherwise it just gets confusing and gives the fans heart palpitations.
 * The flaw with all of these complaints is that it assumes Ozymandias just sits back and allows events to play out after the big scary Gambit Roulette. Ozymandias is a professional Chessmaster. He explicitly states in the comics that he has a massive plan to slowly take over the entire world, East and West, through his multitentacled corporate empire, once the barriers to such a takeover erected by the Cold War have been dismantled by the big alien-invasion freakout. He talks about how the real nature of this plan is to "put aside Alexander" and "become Rameses"—in other words the end state of his plan is becoming benevolent dictator of the whole Earth. Note that in the comic book, the company that created the "dimensional gate" that the monster came through was owned by him—the governments of the world will now probably start throwing their entire defense budgets at "dimensional research" in order to find a way to ward against or counterattack the "alien dimension", and this is a field that Ozymandias has monopoly control over.
 * This is even clearer in the film version, where it's strongly established that the world's greatest expert on Dr. Manhattan's powers, other than Dr. Manhattan himself, is Ozymandias. Combine that with the fact that in the film Ozymandias releases a Manhattan generator providing unlimited free energy to the world right after Dr. Manhattan's "attack", and Ozzie is well on his way to owning all of the world's governments outright.
 * If this is his plan, then one wonders how he has managed to solve the problem of human mortality, given that the flaw of the Roman Empire, decay into corruption over the course of centuries if nothing else, will eventually bite him in the arse, and likely create, if history is any indication at all, a culturally-atrophying totalitarianist world superstate focused above all else on the preservation of its own status quo. In other words, once he himself dies, Veidt may have just damned the world to a Fate Worse Than Death.
 * The man built a machine that creates tachyons (particles that travel in time), perfectioned his body to an nearly impossible level (!he can catch bullets!) and engineered a source of energy similar if not equal to that of Dr. Manhattan. I really don't think death bothers him at all.
 * Considering his level of physical perfection and general total mind and body awareness, integration, etc., he probably thinks that when the time comes he'll have a chance at successfully copying Dr Manhattan's transformation. (Seems to me to be a more logical reason for owning another of those field subtractor thingimawhatsits.)
 * In the movie, why did Ozymandias need to blow up so many cities in order to create world peace? Specifically, an explosion of that magnitude in Moscow, attributable to the USA's pet god (even if it wasn't actually Dr. Manhattan) would have gotten every Soviet nuke in the air as soon as anyone could press the big red button, and there would not have been time to broker a peace. Just hitting New York would have gotten the ball rolling without pushing twitchy Russians over the edge. I never would have thought that a giant psychic squid would have been a more plausible ending than anything.
 * Because, to be blunt, we've already seen New York (or at least the most prominent structure in it) get blown up, and it didn't unite anybody for longer than about a week.
 * That's because in real life, you had 19 Muslim fanatics mount a kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center, and took out less than 5000 people. In the movie, Ozymandias uses tech developed by Dr. Manhattan to cast the fucking Dragon Slave on a dozen cities worldwide, and racks up several megadeaths. It's easier to unite the world against a suddenly inimical god than it is to unite the world against Islamic militants—especially when over a billion people consider themselves adherents of Islam.
 * As a Muslim I take extreme offense to that. It makes it sound like all the billion of us support militarist and terrorist Islam. If you would like for me to take you to school on such misconceptions, I've done it a million times before. But I'll be kind and assume you were just being callously sloppy with your wording.
 * It creates a less "New-York-is-the-center-of-the-universe" feel to it, and makes it slightly more plausible that all the nations of the world would get together a hug under one giant Americo-Soviet hegemony. Remember that the Soviets are really nasty bastards in this story but they're not suicidally insane—there's no point in sending nukes flying to kill Dr. Manhattan himself (or they would've done it already), and there's no point in blowing up Dr. Manhattan's home country when Dr. Manhattan has apparently already done that.
 * That said, his decision to target Moscow (or any other Soviet city) in the movie was still kind of risky and dumb (see above).
 * I don't see any evidence that the Soviets (or even Nixon for that matter) are villains of this piece, or that either side was any worse than Real Life. The presence of superheroes simply dictated both side's responses differently and provided fuel to the hard-liners on both sides.
 * Consider what would happen if Veidt left Russia out of his plan. Suddenly you have several cities around the world destroyed ostensibly by Dr. Manhattan, who's just had an apparent falling out not necessarily with Earth, but definitely with America, and America's big foe in the Cold War remains untouched by Manhattan's apparent attack. What's the US going to think about Manhattan's loyalties (and the idea of making peace with the USSR) after that?
 * In the film, Ozy substitutes Dr. Manhattan for the fake alien invasion. The idea still being that if he gives the world a common enemy, they'll unite to fight against it. But everyone in the world thinks Dr. Manhattan = America, so the movie-Ozy's plan should CAUSE nuclear Armageddon, not prevent it.
 * The world knows, however, that Manhattan abandoned the US and humanity for Mars, his very absence destabilizing the US's hegemony. So no, they wouldn't associate "Manhattan"'s attacks on several American cities and several foreign cities to be the actions of an American agent. Not a plot hole.
 * Yes, still a plot hole (and the one that bothered This Troper the most about the changed ending). In the history of the cold war, every time the United Staes made a major blunder, the communist countries would draw tighter against us. Letting our blue, naked, weaponized man go rogue and start blowing stuff up certainly wouldn't have caused anyone to sympathize with us, or given us allies. Most likely, Ozy's new plan just would have turned the entire situation into "the world vs. the US" more, either from suspicion that we planned it and already backstabbed our own populace, or we're too incompetent to be trusted. IJBM
 * Nope. The movie explicitly implied the Soviet Union viewed Manhattan as a threat as well. It's still not a plot hole.
 * EXACTLY. That's the biggest flaw in the whole "movie vs book" argument about the ending. Blaming Dr. Manhattan, who has been a very prominant American, despite his trip to Mars, and assuming the Soviet Union, let alone the rest of the world, is going to not question it? Besides the fact, why would they have a reason to believe it's not a trick? What was the real motivation for Manhattan to do such a terrible thing anyway? "Well, the Americans recognize it as his power signature, so we MUST believe them!" Yeah, in 1980's Soviet Union (even Alternate Soviet Union), I seriously doubt they just accepted that one at face value. Granted, the squid idea was a little weird, but at least an outside force not connected at all to any antagonist would be a better argument for "Us Against Them."
 * I think the fact that AMERICAN CITIES got completely destroyed is a pretty good reason to believe that it's not a trick. No government would greenlight the destruction of their own major cities just for a political power play. I think that given the fact that Dr. Manhattan had abandoned the US, plus the fact that there would plenty of testimonies from US officials and Veidt (as mentioned above, the leading expert on Dr. Manhattan) of Manhattan's disillusionment of the US Government and human life in general, and the destruction of cities across the world including the US, the idea of Dr. Manhattan going rogue and attacking the world independently of the US would be pretty easy to argue to any skeptical Russians. The only real issue I have with the movie ending is that it make Ozy's Gambit Roulette an even bigger gamble than it was in the book, considering he had much less control over Dr. Manhattan's action's than he did of the squid project in the GN, and so the "Just As Planned" moment falls a little more flat. Seriously, they had to do quite a bit of tweaking to make the new ending believable, but I think—at least for me, anyway—they ultimately succeeded.
 * Also, the Soviets almost certainly have enough data on Dr. Manhattan's energy signature (their allies saw him in action in Vietnam, and if all else failed spies could have gotten access to American files) to verify that part for themselves.

1) Were audiences that concerned about if Doc Manhattan was circumcised or not? Why? 2) No smoking for Laurie? If they have prolonged sex scenes in a film I don't think smoking is that big a deal
 * Two things of the movie I've read here;
 * Because people pick really, really stupid things to worry about.
 * As I understand it, Laurie didn't smoke because the actress didn't want to smoke.