Watchmen was both terrible and wonderful! I will share my thoughts with you below if you promise not to get mad at me over spoilers.

The caveat
This is an adaptation. There’s maybe seven or eight hours of material in the book, and less than three in the film. A lot is simply removed and a few important plot points are re-crafted to fit. That is the nature of adapting books to film. If the text is so sacred to you that this idea offends, the movie will make you angry. I wrapped my head around this fact pretty early into it, and did not grow angry even once during the film. I did snicker at a few things. And I also felt chills run up whenever a sequence was quoted flawlessly from the original.

The good things
The visuals are amazing. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Everything is lovingly, carefully, faithfully rendered from Gibbons’s art. A few things actually work better with actors building scenes together than they do on a page with speech balloons: the chemistry in the dinner date between Laurie and Dan; the way Rorschach inhabits the prison scenes; the distancing of Jon during the TV interview. I’m very glad to report that the acting was nowhere near as bad as I’d heard. Silk Spectre II was solidly believable, Comedian and Rorschach were excellent (Rorschach particularly when the mask was off), Dreiberg and Manhattan were perfect. Veidt was rather different than I’d always imagined him, but I think he worked well as fey Eurotrash instead of all-Am linebacker CEO. The refiguring let his character be all about speed, precision, and cunning, which were traits somewhat at odds with his on-page physicality. The most whispered-about alteration is the film’s abandoning of the space squid – this works pretty well, and was probably necessary. The squid is effective in the book because it is as real as anything else we see (by which I mean it is an illustration), and because we know that it has a team of artist characters who engineer its psychic attack feature. Plus it arrives with three two-page spreads of massacred secondary characters, which is the incredibly long moment in the book when you really feel like everything mattered. There’s no time in this film for the New Yorker street characters, and no time for the artists (or their finely wrought nightmare side effects). But the main thing is the realness of the moving image; a CGI squid just wouldn’t have cut it as the great unifier of cold war nations. In the book we are taught carefully to believe that the world suddenly believes in aliens. In this version of the movie, we’d never buy that, so the shortcut seems a pretty solid choice. I want to say more about what works in the film, but it’s difficult. The parts of the movie that succeed are the parts of the book that are most faithfully reproduced. The faithfulness of those reproductions is a stunning accomplishment. And the scope of that accomplishment is right up in your face for the whole 2h:40m. I don’t need to sell it.

The bad things
There’s plenty of little stuff to pick at, like the jarringly poor age/youth makeup on 67-year-old Silk Spectre I and 16-year-old Comedian, the trashiness of the Owlship sex scene, Laurie’s missing cigarettes (turning her flamethrower mishap into a total WTF), a couple of Shumacher’s-Batman-style breastplate nipples, and whoever your favorite secondary character is (he/she is barely/not in the film). Of all the things from the original to keep intact, the 30-second guesswork hack of the world’s smartest man’s password was not a good choice. The few non-book scenes are noticeably weaker than the surrounding material, and probably served a studio’s idea of the shape of a blockbuster better than they serve the narrative, as do the slowdowns for expositive hand-holding through the revelation of Laurie’s paternity and the solution to the Pyramid Deliveries mystery. But those are small problems. The real issue is the direction. I realized last night that Zack Snyder just isn’t a very good director. He understands imagery, iconography, visual detail, motion, action, and violence. He does not seem to understand character or emotion. He managed to make a movie that is not at all dumb, yet somehow doesn’t make any sense. There is so much in Alan Moore’s depiction of these people that makes them plausible, makes their inner lives rich, and makes the pathway of their difficult decisions both surprising and inevitable. Even with huge swaths of the dialog lifted directly from the comic, this movie doesn’t tell us anything about what it means to these people to become, to be, to abandon being, or to have been heroes. If you’ve read the book ten times, you are ready and able to fill in every blank for yourself while the panels unfold in high resolution onscreen. But if you bring a friend and introduce them to Watchmen in the theater, your friend will probably feel a bit bewildered.

I think I will watch it again when the director’s cut adds another half hour. Maybe that will help it to be a more coherent movie. But I’m not betting on that. And, of course, it doesn’t matter. It’s a story I already know and understand in every aspect.
And it looks so FUCKING AWESOME.

One of my only major problems with the movie is that there were some things that were needlessly left out or changed, like Wally being Jon's college room-mate instead of the guy he met on his first day at Gila Flats, or like you said about Laurie not smoking, or Jon fixing Janey's watch and it being her watch in the time lock test vault, or many of the other little things. My friends seemed to have no problem with the movie, but I guess that is what I get for reading the book first.

I have not read Watchmen, and think I enjoy the movie more for it. I had no hopes to be dashed, I walked into the theatre with my loftiest dream being that it has better dialogue than Flash Gordon did.

Good side:
The visuals were stunning, and left little to the imagination with some fairly hardcore violence. The sex scenes were short and pervaded with mood-lightening jokes. The people seemed as if they could have been real; they had hopes, regrets, and spurts of stupidity.

Bad side:
It honestly felt like it should have been longer. For instance, what the hell was that crazy blue tiger thing? I could tell that Ozymandias regretted killing it, but I didn't KNOW he did. Richard Nixon had a comically large nose, this is fine when it's illustrated, but seriously. In a movie full of real people with real noses they turned Nixon into frakkin' Pinnochio. Lastly, the thing I disliked most about the movie, the prevalence of blue dong. Granted it occurs in the comic, granted it should rightfully occur in the movie; but really? Did we need that scene with five of them on screen at the same time?


All in all, I'd happily watch it again, and will, in all probability purchase the DVD.

This was a movie about 6 characters and a bunch of extras who might have been lucky enough to have been thrown a bone with a line of dialogue.

Too much pandering to an audience that they expected to be too dumb to follow a plot.

I take it you are unhappy with it?

I've never read the Watchmen, but I liked 300, and I love action movies, so I thought I would dig it.

I didn't.

I went in expecting to see an action movie, and instead got some hodgepodge 3 hour rambling diatribe on philosophy with random bits of the BEST gore I've seen in a long time, and the WORST porn I've ever seen. The action sequences were mostly good, but I kept nodding off whenever the blue-man would appear and start droning on in his monotone voice hypnotizing me to sleep. My brother-in-law with super graphic novel powers told me that's what watchmen was about ... How would I have known? ... I'm a computer hacker geek ...

I was the -*only*- person in the theatre who cheered when Rorschach bashed in the pedophiles head with the meat cleaver (again and again and again). What's up with that? THAT SCENE WAS AWESOME!!!

They replaced the part where he leaves him chained up, drops the meat cleaver next to him and sets fire to the place with the head-cleave scene because, get this, because SAW already did it.

That's what I heard.

Yeah, in the comic that scene is both way more nasty and way less violent -- Rorschach leaves him the choice and the killer can't stand to cut himself up and dies in the fire. But SAW movies basically took that idea and beat it to death for five movies worth of nonsense. It is in fact possible to have your ideas destroyed by repetition in between when you think of them and when they get put onto film. I was a little surprised by the alteration, but when it happened I was like "oh, right, because of SAW."

dj, the story of Watchmen is anything but an action movie. It's a big piece of philosophy about the history of comic books and what it might be like if comic book people had to be real people for a little while. Oh, and the impending nuclear apocalypse, which I think some of the young folks don't remember very well on account of: it didn't end up happening.

It does have action in it. But it is an idea-focused and character-driven story. Too bad the Watchmen trailer and the expectations built by 300 misled you!

If anyone has ignored the spoiler warnings and is reading this thread w/out knowing the material: if you haven't read the book, I highly recommend reading it through and seeing if it captures your imagination before you take a crack at the movie version.

OR, take Previ's advice, and see it on its own! It's hard for me to imagine that experience, but you have his testimonial.

Not to mention because of MAD MAX! I thought it was done better at the end of of that movie than in all of the SAW movies.

I have found that that is the way of things that are loved by nerds and then become films. See the movie first, and then read the novel or what have you. In this manner you don't subject yourself to the "but he, and it never, where was?" thing that just crams the internet every time a comic book movie comes out. Now I can get the graphic novel trade paper back and read it without the movie losing anything.

Like many things in our nerdy world, it's always bad to make pre-judgements.

I am glad I saw it. At least I earned extra geek points for going to the midnight opener. And it gave me a reason to post.

My brother in law gave me the book and I'm going to read it. Maybe then I'll understand it better.

The trailer for Wolverine looked more up my alley movie wise. :)

Ooh baby, I need me some more Hugh Jackman stabbing people. I can't wait.

Totally with you here!

I started to read Watchmen a couple months ago and then put it down because I decided I'd better see the movie first. Because the book is always better than the movie, so if I haven't read the book already then the movie still has a chance at being good.

So, anyway, I loved Watchmen. I thought it was great. It wasn't perfect, but the good outweighed the bad.

Everything you guys have said, the visuals, the mood... the visuals. ;) And I thought the soundtrack was pretty epic too.

Rorschach was a badass. The chick playing Spectre II normally annoys me but she didn't here. That was impressive. The Comedian remained a mystery to me... I still don't really understand why he was so upset before he died, I don't think that was explained well. And we saw bits of why some characters were the way they were, but I never saw anything that explained why Comedian was such an asshole.

Anyway, now I can't wait to finally read the book. I expect it to be fully awesome.

The blue cat thing was in the comic book and was tied in with the giant squid that was supposed to kill new york. So since they took out the giant squid, they left out the five minutes of film that would have explained the cat thing, it's name was Bubastis.

I wish people wouldn't think this was an action movie. It is a drama with bits of action not an action movie. Also, in one of the earlier scenes there is long foreshadowing pause on Qzy. Him being evil is supposed to be a surprise.

And the only explanation given for why the Comedian was an asshole is that...... SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST ASSHOLES!

And another thing, when they do the flashback to Walter Kovak's youth, and he is beating up the other kids, why did they not have him burn the kids eye out with the lit cigarette?! I guess nobody smokes! Getting rid of all the smoking. Assholes.

People are afraid that people smoking will cause people to smoke. Which is a load of malarkey, I know for a fact two people whose parents smoked their entire lives and don't smoke.

SAW and it's fifteen sequels are a little more apparent in the eyes of the viewing public.

Just so you guys know, I fucking hate the SAW series of movies.

Not even the first one?

I liked this movie. I read the book a few years ago on a whim, so I had that before I saw the movie.

Pretty cool flick.