#Ozymandias i did it serial#

If I was teaching a class in film editing, I would cue this up along with the special editions of the Star Wars movies as examples of how subtle the difference in editing is between a great film and a mediocre one.

This, too, effectively undercuts the ability for the finality of the line to land. If you did something, on the other hand, then it’s done. If you trigger something, you have set it in motion (which inherently means you could still stop it).

“I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago.”Īnd the semantic shift, though subtle, is not insignificant.

#Ozymandias i did it serial#

The first of these (changing “Republic serial villain” to “comic book villain”) is largely irrelevant to the current discussion (although it does needlessly remove nuance one of the major points in Watchmen is that in a world where superheroes actually exist, they aren’t perfect heroes - it isn’t the Marvel universe where the Marvel comics are actually published it’s a universe where superhero comics didn’t exist). (Which is why you never see anybody quoting the line who hasn’t read it in the comic book: In the movie, it’s simply not quotable.) The entire effect is to anticipate (and thus undercut) the line and then place the emphasis on the action to follow instead of the line itself.Īll of that, by itself, would completely ruin the effectiveness of the line. Hard cuts away from the line to immediately show what happened 35 minutes ago.Cuts away from Ozymandias just before he says the line to a reaction shot of Rorschach and Nite-Owl.He doesn’t give your imagination a moment to catch up to the rest of your brain and go, “HOLY SHIT!” Instead he: He doesn’t let the meaning of the words settle over you. (I’ve also always read the line as being delivered the same way someone might say, “I picked up the groceries today.” But I recognize that that’s idiosyncratic.) What makes the line haunting in the comic book is that you linger in a moment of stillness and silence the reader basically joined Rorschach and Nite-Owl standing in a stunned silence as the horrible implications of that simple, casually spoken statement. More importantly, Snyder screws up the execution. This fundamentally changes the tone of the plan from “humanity will come together to face a common foe” to “humanity will behave itself or the angry god will come back to punish us”. First, the plan from the original story shifts from framing aliens humans will never find but would be able to at least hypothetically defend themselves against (as evidenced by the fact they just made a mistake in their invasion plans) to framing a guy who humans absolutely, positively cannot defend themselves against (as demonstrated by the fact he just casually destroyed two major cities) and who is going to live on Mars.