neither movie should really be looked at as an adaptation but rather seperate movies inspired by comic books. i enjoyed the movie more than i thought it would. maybe because i saw too many pre production stills and knew it was going to be dark knight with watchmen characters. it was woefully inadequate in capturing all that made the book so satisfying and memorable but i think thats just part of why you have two different works of art in two different art forms. i guess just appreciate how much hard work and millions of dollars that was poured into some small but birlliant part of a mostly ignored geeked out medium

the silver lining is that since watchmen wasnt a run away blockbuster you arent going to see hollywood lining up countless other works of comic art that they will attempt to translate faithfully to film but really only end up raping and murdering in the quest for a quick buck.

First of all, despite the fact that I really admire a lot of things about the movie, I’ll be the first to admit that it has a lot of failings. The primary things that come to mind are pacing and the acting of Malin Ackerman and Matthew Goode. But I really didn’t have a problem with the slow-mo action filming. It was never the case that these guys couldn’t fight. When their backs were against the wall, they kicked plenty of ass (even if they were losers/had disturbing, though internally consistent, ethics). My issue with the fight scenes would be how gory Snyder made them, but I personally am cool with gore so I didn’t mind, I just understand that others did. Also, as far as the dialogue, I was actually surprised by how well the new dialogue worked and how bad a lot of the dialogue lifted from the book sounded. I think the writers would have been better off trusting their instincts more often rather than lifting so much dialogue straight from the book, which was written, after all, as a comic, not a film. I also thought they nailed the sex scene in Archie. Alan Moore wrote that to be darkly humorous, and they nailed it, straight down to the money shot of flame that I thought was effectively lifted from the book.

Also, as far as the soundtrack… I mean, most of the songs were taken straight from the chapter titles. It’s not Zach Snyder’s fault that in the years between the release of the book and the movie, those songs became very commonly used in TV and movies. As for The Times They Are A’Changing in particular, I thought that whole sequence was brilliant.

Anyway, the best part about the movie is that a lot of the core ideas from the book really shone through, and Hollywood will probably never see anything quite like it again. Its flaws do bother me a lot, but I take much solace in knowing that Zach Snyder ultimately compromised very little, stuck very closely to the source material (at times perhaps to a fault), and presented a very challenging film that deserves to be seen and appreciated on its merits.