I really liked the movie ending, but there was something naggingly annoying about it that I only put my finger on this morning.

The squid was an unambiguously external, alien threat. It makes some amount of sense for the world to put aside their differences because of it. But Dr Manhattan is, as far as the Soviets are concerned, an American superweapon. It’s not clear to me that their first reaction after Moscow disappeared would be anything other than hitting the Big Red Button and asking questions later… and, perhaps more importantly, I can’t imagine that Adrian’s plan depended on it.

Obviously the fact that Dr M publicly flipped out and left Earth a few days earlier lends some credibility to it, and makes the whole idea quite elegant, to the extent that I think this could have been addressed with only minor tweaks. They could have stuck more closely to the novel and only attacked New York… although then it might have looked more like revenge on the US than a declaration of war on the world. Even if New York had been the first in the row of monitors, rather than the last, so that Russia had time to find out that America had been attacked before they were attacked themselves…

Hmm.

I agree about the Rule of Cool messing up a few notes in the movie. Only Rorschach and Adrian have any excuse to be in shape – Dan and Laurie kicking butt in the prison break scene was a bit of a mood breaker. And even Rorschach after he jumps out the window was too competent fighting off the SWAT team in fair combat – he’s a guerrilla who fights dirty on his own terms, not a l33t Kung Fu Master.