So it was with some trepidation that I went to see the film version with jackdied and a few other friends. Watchmen has long been considered "unfilmable." Its scope is epic, the book deals with complex issues and people, and the imagery is fanastic. To gut the plot would ruin the movie. To simplify it or make it more kid-friendly for a wider audience would ruin the movie. To change the types of visuals to make them easy to film... well, you get the idea.

Fortunately, Zak Snyder was responsible for bringing Watchmen to the big screen. This gave hope that the movie might be both a faithful adaptation and, well, good. His incarnation of 300 seemed ripped right out of Frank Miller's comic pages and was highly entertaining.

Snyder's Watchmen is a triumph, both a successful, faithful adaptation and a good film in its own right. It's not perfect, by any means. The performances were a bit uneven; Malin Ackerman as Silk Spectre II just wasn't good, but Jackie Earle Haley did a tremendous job with Rorshach. And the very exacting reproduction of frames from the graphic novel left the movie feeling without a soul of its own at times.

Seeing it on the big screen was an experience. As a big fan of the original material, I was very happy to see a successful adaptation that was faithful to the comic and treated it seriously. Frankly, I wasn't sure that it could be done.

[jackdied] My two bits:

The movie is half ultra-violence, half sex, and sometimes both at once. This is not a movie for children. There was a mother sitting in front of us with two kids aged 10-12. I thought (hoped?) she would walk them out during the pool table rape scene but they stayed for the whole movie.

I hadn't read the book so I didn't have any expectations going in [this is heresy for someone who was of comic book collecting age in the 80s]. I have since gone back and read bobsalive's copy and I have to say the subplots that were weak in the movie are where it didn't copy the book. By contrast the minor details (as opposed to plot) that were changed and invented for the movie were all golden. The opening half hour is all 60s-80s flashbacks (mostly 80s): the Mclaughlin group, Nixon (he won Vietnam and was re-elected twice), Kent State. What would be groan-inducing conservative villains in a Susan Serandon movie work because this is a comic book movie so everything is over-the-top.