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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.