A Fan's Dream Come True

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2009)

I'll start off with the fact it is about 85% loyal to the comic. 10% of this are having the comic itself transform into a workable script, adding and removing minor bits, altering dialogs a bit and turning some info from Under The Hood and such into actual text in the movie. The remaining 5% are altered scenes, including the so-called different ending, and I'll get to that.
The movie itself is insanely faithful, and in a great way. Many scenes, like the Mars flashback or the fight in the alley interwoven with cuts into exposition work as seamlessly as they did in the book. A lot of notable quotes made it into the movie, and a lot of notable quotes were added. Rorshach's journal is, if memory serves, verbatim. The order of things and a significant amount of images are precise, which doesn't just go to service the geek fandom - it looks genuinely good, and works genuinely well.
Some scenes have changed - remember the scene that Saw shamelessly ripped off from Watchmen, and earned it it's name-sake? Well, it isn't in it's original form in the Watchmen movie... and for good reason, I guess. Nobody wants all the Watchmen rookies going "Har, that's from SAW!" Besides, what happens in the scene in the movie makes a little bit more contextual sense, so I'm alright with it. The ending is different, yes, but in a way that does indeed work better for a movie. In fact, it would've worked better in the comic-book, too, in my opinion.
What would the lay-men think of this movie? I think some will see it as a stunning, relentless and ultra-violent masterpiece like we have known the comic-book to be for years, whilst some will simply stare blankly at it and won't know what to make of it. It's fast, super-fast, and raises so many questions and has so many details and asks so many philosophical inquiries, that, in book form, are a lot easier to handle. When John drops the "no god" bomb, when Rorschach reveals his depravity, when Dan is... unable to step up to the plate, it's all so... fast moving. And that's how I read it, and how I understood it, and how I enjoyed it. I'm simply not so sure about everyone else. The masses probably won't love it to bits as much as they liked the Dark Knight. But I know I love it so much more.
It is gory, it is unrelenting, it is beautifully crafted. The soundtrack is spot-on. The slow-motion, the choreography, the sets, the design, the colors - it all works perfectly.
So, hat's off to Zack Snyder. You are a good, kind and wise man. You have done an excellent job. Everything I second guessed you for, I was proved wrong. Your new ending is a lot more compelling to those who found the squid ending a bit weird, and indeed works much better in a movie.
Watchmen is an amazing film. It is not quite as riveting as it is in book form, but dammit, it seems like one of the best comic books I've ever read makes a really damn good movie, too. An excellent one, even. It is by far the best comic book movie ever made, and it's near perfect in adapting one of the best comic books ever written, and with a final director's cut on the way with The Black Freighter and Under the Hood, I can't freakin' WAIT.