[cross-posted from General Technics]
I saw it a couple of days ago, at the $5.50 matinee. (My local mongo-plex designates the first showing of anything of the day the "matinee".)
I had always thought the neologism "graphic novel" was foolishly self-important and pretentious – until I read Watchmen. Clearly, one of the major challenges in filming it would be editing out a movie-sized piece which is still recognizable. I think the writers did a good job.
By now, there's an accumulated body of work translating comic pages to the screen. Watchmen shouldn't have posed any real challenges there, and it didn't. Nice job.


That leaves the few original bits . . . Rewriting the ending seemed unaccountable and gratuitous, and I still have no idea what the point was. The new ending is alright, but I don't see any improvement over the original.
Adding some currently fashionable kung-fu ultraviolence seemed pointless. Especially since the movie seemed willing to challenge some of the more facile assumptions about what a comics-movie ought to do.
Which leaves me with one last question: If this movie is supposed to be so Eighties, why was almost all the music (mostly well-selected) Sixties? While I came out of the theater reasonably satisfied, when I reflect that one of the high points for me was My Chemical Romance's punked up version of Dylan, that doesn't really seem to reflect well on the overall artistic success of the movie!