I've seen Watchmen and am left with mixed decidedly feelings about it. The best way to sum it up would be that it's a successful adaptation of the novel but not an equally successful movie. Like many others I've probably been seeing a movie of Watchmen in my mind for the bones of twenty years (having borrowed it from a mate in '89 and going through a couple of copies of my own in my travels)
In many ways the cause of the main flaw was mine as I watched each scene with a mind's eye fo "oh look it's the but with X and wow that's so fateful!" But that mindset I feel harmed the overall movie watching experience. One other problem with the length of the novel is that elements inevitability had to be dropped and most of those dropped elements involved minor characters. Yet though they were minor they were for the most part real people, not super heroes and their fates as the plans enfolded through the course of the novel were very much part of what made you invest in the outcome. The newspaper man, and the comic reading kid (that was me for so many years, on the lower shelf in the local newsagents reading Cheeky) the trucker and her estranged lover. I expect they will be restored in the DVD but I felt their absence hurt the movie.
I will watching it again just not sure if I'd do it in the movies and I'll be there with my cash in my grubby mitts to get the DVD if only for the Black Freighter.
