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In 20 words or less: I liked it more than I thought I would, and it’s probably the best Hollywood adaptation you could expect.

THE GOOD

• The first fifteen minutes of the movie were just about perfect. They condensed about a dozen subplots into a very effective slideshow that brought newbies up to date on WATCHMEN’s 1986 and how it came to be, while also providing a non-stop flow of insider references to the fanboys among us. If you could distill it and bottle it, you’d have a never-fail cure for nerd impotence, because it gave me the kind of hard-on that I haven’t had since I was 15. Which was also probably WATCHMEN-related, come to think of it.
• Jackie Earl Haley absolutely nailed Rorschach, and they left most of the best Rorschach bits in the movie. Of all of the characters, I figured that Rorschach would fare best in his translation from Alan Moore comic book to Zack Snyder movie, and I was very relieved to see that that was the case. And I really liked the mask effect. Much better than drawing a blot on a pair of white tights with a Sharpie, and probably more comfortable. I speak from experience.
• Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl was also an unexpected treat. If anyone has any quibbles about the character or his story, address them to Moore and not the filmmakers, because he stepped right off of the page. I have to give a lot of credit to Snyder and Wilson for having the guts to resist making Nite Owl less of a pudgy has-been and refusing to tone down the gadgety geekiness of the character, despite overwhelming studio objections, I’m sure. He was about as far from a Hollywood super hero as you’re likely to get, and that’s exactly why the character and his story have always been among my favorites.
• I loved all of the Comedian stuff, even the bits that were extremely hard to watch (the attempted rape scene in particular). Jeffrey Dean Morgan had his work cut out for him, and he grappled with Eddie Blake’s contradictions more successfully than I could have hoped. Maybe it’s because the Comedian’s role seemed larger because it was the least edited of all of the characters’, or maybe it’s because the horror of the character was more visceral on film than in print, but I thought he might have been even more effective on screen than in the original graphic novel. Please don’t tell Alan Moore I said that.
• Overall, I thought the movie captured the spirit of the graphic novel well, with as few concessions to the realities of making a Hollywood blockbuster as possible. It was respectful to the source material to a fault, and the shortcuts and liberties that it took were clearly out of necessity, and not because Snyder et al. thought that they could tell the story better than the original. And I was pleased that Alan Moore’s name did not appear anywhere in the credits.
• Finally, I’m happy to report that, among a scientifically unreliable sample of one, the movie was extremely successful among WATCHMEN virgins. My girlfriend does not read comics or even like comics, and she only managed to force herself through the first chapter of the graphic novel before seeing the movie. On top of that, she sorely tested our relationship by declaring that she “didn’t really like the writing.” But she loved the movie so much that she’s determined to read the rest of the graphic novel to fill in all of the backstory that was only hinted at, like how Rorschach got his mask and what that weird puma thing was that Ozymandias had at the end of the movie. Success!

THE BAD

• As good as Haley, Wilson and Morgan were as Rorschach, Nite Owl and the Comedian, Malin Ackerman was exactly that awful as Silk Spectre. Considering that she’s the only major female character in the entire story, and that she has to be the emotional counterpoint to Dr. Manhattan’s evolving inhumanity, I’d have hoped that they’d have gone with, y’know, an actress and not just a nice pair of tits. Not that I have any objections to a nice pair of tits, but why is it that in Hollywood, they almost never come paired with any acting chops? I expect my girlfriend’s eyes to glaze over with boredom when I try to explain the coolness of superheroes or science fiction to her. But Silk Spectre is supposed to be my secret fantasy woman who not only thinks that stuff is awesome but also dresses up in skin-tight latex, fights crime, and is eager to get it on with living nuclear reactors and men who fly around in giant flamethrowing owls. She joins Katie Holmes and Halle Berry on my list of Actresses Who Can’t Pretend That They Don’t Think That This Stuff Is Retarded, Even For a Very Large Check.
• Anyone who didn’t realize that Ozymandias was going to turn out to be the villain should be banned from ever operating heavy machinery. Coming into the movie, my girlfriend had no idea how it was supposed to end or what the characters’ final fates were. She figured out Ozy was behind it all during his second appearance, when Dan goes to Adrian’s office. Maybe Synder and the scriptwriters just assumed that a critical mass of fans knew how it was going to end, and so they just didn’t bother misdirecting us, but it felt extraordinarily lazy. Stan Kubrick knew that most of the folks who came to see The Shining were probably familiar with the Stephen King novel, but he still had the good sense to throw us a curveball by offing Scatman Crothers, whose character was supposed to be the hero of the day.
• Speaking of Ozy, Matthew Goode was given next to nothing to do as Adrian Veidt, and he still managed to underwhelm. Veidt was probably the least-developed character in the graphic novel, and the movie whittled him down even further. But I did like his vintage Mac SE, and the conspiracy theory that he’s supposed to be Steve Jobs
• While I appreciate how faithful the film was to the graphic novel, there were bits that just didn’t work. Some of the dialogue in particular was jarring. Especially in the early part of the story, the characters speak in a non-stop flow of pathetic fallacies, unintentionally referencing other events that they are unaware of. It comes off as clever on the page, but as soon as it’s spoken aloud, it’s like Harrison Ford’s anecdotal comment to George Lucas: “You can write this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.”
• As a corollary, whenever the film took liberties with the original, it suffered. Nothing unique to the movie was as cleverly crafted as the book. Much of it smacked of compromise for the sake of time constraints or Hollywood action blockbuster pacing. Both Rorschach’s prison term and Dr. Manhattan’s origin were ruthlessly hacked down, and while I understand why you couldn’t fit the entireties of both into the movie, it sacrificed two of the high points of the story by reducing them to quick plot beats. I thought Dr. Manhattan’s character arc was particularly weak. We never really got to see him as human, so we lost most of his tragic drift away from humanity.
• And then there’s the ending. I knew going in that they’d changed it, so I wasn’t upset or offended by it. It remained true to the spirit of the original ending (and I was amused that the acronym S.Q.U.I.D. appeared in the background of a scene set in Veidt’s lab). But I just thought that the whole thing was rushed and underwhelming. Never have the deaths of 15 million people felt so inconsequential. I’m sure that 9/11 was the reason that they didn’t linger on the devastation caused by Veidt’s plan, but come on. The trailer for Terminator: Salvation that ran before WATCHMEN hit harder than the climax of the feature presentation. If you’re going to show us every blow of a woman getting the shit kicked out of her by her rapist, or a guy having his arms severed with a circular saw in gory detail, or Dr. Manhattan exploding VC with a wave of his hand, you don’t have to cover our eyes when you’re showing us a devastated NYC — that somehow still has the World Trade Center standing in the background.

THE DISTRACTING BLUE DONG

• (You thought I was just kidding about that, didn’t you?)
• Let me be perfectly clear: I’m not horrified at the sight of a dong — large, blue, or otherwise. I myself have had one for about three decades, and the two of us have had some great times together. Dongs are A-OK in my book. But despite the fact that I went into the movie expecting to see a lot of blue dong, I found myself constantly distracted by it. Not revolted, not bewitched. Just distracted. And I give Snyder a lot of credit for having the — wait for it – balls to show us an aggregate three full minutes of blue dong, but this is one of those cases where he just didn’t need to be that faithful to the source material. A giant glowing blue bald guy with godlike powers isn’t enough to ask an audience to accept? You have to ask them to swallow his dong too?
• Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

WATCHMEN has been one of my favorite works of modern literature since I first read it in the early 90′s, and it’s one of the few things that I was a huge fan of at 15 that doesn’t embarrass me today. It’s held up over the course of at least a dozen re-readings, and despite a very few nagging flaws and shortcomings (which I’ve never been able to come up with better alternatives to), it’s the closest thing we’re likely to see to a perfect superhero comics story. Other writers have built on the foundations that Alan Moore laid in 1986 and achieved some remarkable results, but WATCHMEN did it first, and more than twenty years later, WATCHMEN still does it best.

Ever since I became aware of WATCHMEN a few years after its publication, I’ve been aware of rumors of a WATCHMEN movie, which was always supposed to be in some stage of production. I remember reading a bootleg copy of an early screenplay that my friend Tony managed to get his hands on around 1991, back when Terry Gilliam was still allegedly attached to the project. And since superhero movies were generally garbage (with one or two exceptions) until about 2000, I was secretly relieved every time I heard that the latest WATCHMEN deal had fallen through, and that they were back to square one.

But now my worst nerd fear has been realized: WATCHMEN opens in theaters this Friday. Even worse, the trailers and viral marketing campaign are really, really good, and they’re getting my hopes up, despite my best intentions. I’ve already purchased my ticket for opening night, but here’s why (and how) I’m keeping my expectations low.

Year Zero had great viral marketing too. I’m a rabid Nine Inch Nails fan, and I was never more excited about Trent Reznor’s latest project than when he hired Level 42 Marketing to create an online alternate-reality game set in a dystopian future to promote his upcoming Year Zero album. And then the album came out and it was… okay. Kind of mediocre by NIN standards, actually. So when I see NBS news clips from the 1970′s celebrating a decade of Dr. Manhattan, or PSAs warning citizens to support the Keene Act and report illegal vigilante activity, I geek out and get excited. And then I remember Year Zero.

Some of the most talented people in Hollywood are the ones who edit the trailers. You can make anything look good for 90 seconds. Vince Vaughn owes his career to this truism. No trailer will expose flaws in the pacing or the acting. It gets to pick and choose from the best bits of the film, in three-second bursts. And yes, it can reassure us fanboys of its fidelity with brief clips of scenes taken straight out of the comic, but we haven’t had to worry about a superhero movie taking gross liberties with its source material for about a decade (Frank Miller’s Spiritnotwithstanding). We shouldn’t be excited about the fact that the WATCHMEN trailers look great. That should be a given.

Alan Moore hates the cinema, and apparently the feeling is mutual. Moore is the greatest comics writer in the history of the medium, but none of his works or the characters he’s created have ever been successfully adapted to the big screen. Half of the movies based on his creations read like the top row of the “$1 for 5 Nights” shelf at Blockbuster: Swamp Thing. Constantine. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The Hughes Brothers turned in a passable Jack the Ripper flick with From Hell, but the film omitted everything that made the graphic novel a transcendent work of art, instead of just another Ripper yarn. V For Vendetta was probably the most successful adaptation, but again, it left out all of the moral ambiguities of the original, which was a much darker and more complex piece of work. (And to his credit, Moore has steadfastly refused any involvement with the cinematic bastardizations of his work, going so far as to send his royalty checks to the artists of the series.)

There’s such a thing as being too faithful. If WATCHMEN director Zack Snyder thinks he can make a successful movie by just taking what’s on the page and putting it on the screen, he’s going to wind up with nothing more than Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. That approach worked for Snyder’s last effort, 300, because Frank Miller’s comics are essentially storyboards for an action movie (which is why Sin City worked as well). But WATCHMEN is a very different kind of story. It’s a deconstruction of superhero comics intended for an audience well-versed in the conventions of superhero comics. To achieve the artistic success of the graphic novel, WATCHMEN the movie needs to do for superhero movies what the graphic novel did for comics. And I don’t think that there’s enough of a superhero movie tradition to draw from at this point to pull it off, and I don’t think that Snyder is the director to pull it off, even if there was. More on that in a minute.

It’s too big. WATCHMEN is the comics equivalent of a Russian novel. It revolves around six major characters, each with their own significant storyline that weaves through the others’. Half of the book takes place in flashbacks, and the world that it’s set in is an alternate reality version of our own, which practically makes it a seventh major character. Even if you cleverly condense some of the comic’s subplots into newsreels and DVD-only extras, you’re still faced with a story that’s several hours too long to fit into a theatrical release. There’s a reason that studios have shied away from doing ensemble superhero team movies: they’re nearly impossible to pull off. Threading the needle perfectly gets you X-Men II, where Halle Berry’s Storm still stands around in the background wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. In a worst-case scenario, you wind up with Spider-Man 3.

It’s the wrong kind of superhero story. So far, Hollywood has only managed to make one kind of superhero movie successfully: an origin story that’s heavy on the action. Batman Begins, Spider-Man, and Iron Man are all tales of our heroes and how they came to be. The Dark Knight and Spider-Man II are villain origin stories. Even X-Men II leans heavily on the origins of Wolverine and Nightcrawler. But WATCHMEN dumps you right into the middle of a story that moves backward and forward simultaneously. There are a couple of origins to draw from, but they’re not the main thrust of the book. And there’s also not a ton of action in it, relative to other superhero stories. It’s a slow burn that shows how its protagonists have shaped and been shaped by the world around them, not an escalating series of boss battles. You can try and fit the square peg of WATCHMEN into the round hole of contemporary superhero movies, but you’re going to lose much of what makes WATCHMEN so unique. And consider that Zack Snyder’s only other movies of note are a remake of a horror movie that quadrupled the action and cut out all of the social commentary (Dawn of the Dead) and a comic book adaptation where the source material did all of the heavy lifting for him (300).

It cannot possibly meet expectations. This is what it all comes down to. WATCHMEN has been so universally acclaimed for so long that it is absolutely impossible to live up to its reputation. Hell, as near-perfect as the graphic novel is, it probably can’t even match its own hype for someone coming into it now. You might as well try to shoot Citizen Kane II while you’re at it. And because the hopes and expectations are so high, even a better-than-average adaptation is going to feel like a crushing disappointment to those who have put the graphic novel on a pedestal for more than two decades.

But here’s the good news: Regardless of how disappointing the movie is, WATCHMEN will always remain a high-water mark for comics, and the hype for the movie has generated tremendous interest in the graphic novel. A few weeks ago, WATCHMEN was one of the top-ten bestsellers at Powell’s City of Books here in Portland, the largest new and used bookstore in the country. So in a worst-case scenario, at least the consensus opinion of a failed WATCHMEN movie will be that it can’t hold a candle to the original. And I’m sure Alan Moore would be just fine with that.