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The thing I thought was the biggest difference between the Watchmen book and movie besides the ending was them not having the speech in the vivarium in it's entirety. They took chunks of the speech out and spread them around throughout the movie, and I understand why they don't want a really long speech that late in the movie particularly. I want to make clear I think this was a perfectly valid choice given the differences in medium. However, it really softens Veidt's character. Again, this also is a valid choice for film. In the movie, Veidt is still a fanatic who does something horrific in the name of what he believes, possibly correctly, is the greater good. It is a horrific, unforgivable thing, but it still feels like logic, something Jon with his distance from humanity can bring himself to reluctantly accept once it is fait accompli. In Leverage they call things like the speech in the vivarium, the "evil speech of evil." This is where the villain (or Nate) explains at length why what ze did is completely justified. The idea being that everyone things they are the good guy, no matter how much damage they do. Rereading the graphic novel, Adrian's The Vivarium speech exposes Adrian's grandioseness not as astute self-branding based on childhood interests, but outright madness and wild hubris, that his intellect has long been the servant of his desire to d**k measure with the greats of history. It gives the thing a very different feel than movie Adrian's sorrowful chess player's understanding of the inevitability of his logic in the face of the scale of global nuclear war. I am not sure which character design is ultimately better. I'm actually leaning toward the movie here, if you can believe it. Movie Adrian is more relatable, his hubris is on a more ordinary human scale, and therefore more chilling. Book Adrian is so over the top, it's a little too easy to blame it on bad brain chemistry. It lets humanity off the hook a little. I could argue that movie Adrian is more in keeping artistically with Jon, Dan, and Laurie's complicity. It means under the right (or wrong) conditions, any one of us could do what Adrian did. It is more like Jack's choice at the end of Children of Earth, something everyone hopes they wouldn't do, but is sort of secretly glad someone else did.
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