I purchased the graphic novel, Watchmen, last year sometime in anticipation of its film adaptation debut. I read it in about three days and finished right in time to catch the movie on Monday. Since the material was so fresh in my mind, it was amazing to view what many have said, is the closest adaptation a comic book movie has ever come to portraying the true heart of the material. It was as if the script were the book itself. Pane sequences were framed in the exact manner as some of the scenes of the movie. I listened to /filmcast review of the movie with Kevin Smith which I thought covered most of the major points. I thought that the movie did great justice to the source material. The majority of cast choices were spot-on. The tone matched that of the book. My only quams were these:
- score/music choice for the owl ship rescue and then over-the-top sex scene
- time that was spent on character backgrounds/histories (it needed more but we would have been seeing at least a 5 hour movie)
- missing halloween/Hollis scene
- missing hover bikes in the snow
- casting of Adrian Veidt as he didn’t match the build of his character
- change of young Rorschach fight with 2 bullies (no cigarette in the eye)
- missing parallel storyline of the Black Freighter as I enjoyed this so much in the book
Apart from these things, the movie still stands as one of the truest reflections of an author and an artist’s original work. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you have seen the movie and not read the book, I implore you to read up on the select few details that were compromised or otherwise missed in the movie.
