I saw it this weekend and generally liked it. Definitely a far more faithful adaptation, for better or worse, than I would have ever expected could come about.

I'd say that in presenting the cliff's notes version of the story the most notable loss were all the characters that weren't superheroes... All of the man on the street stuff has been dropped. Cops, the news vendor and kid, the editor of the paper, most of the psychiatrist, etc. If it didn't directly involve one of the "Watchmen" (as the movie named them), then the scene was dropped. Understandable, but then it does make the big attack at the end fairly hollow without knowing anyone caught in it.

All told though, I liked it. I do think that, for someone who hasn't read the comic, it would be much like the Harry Potter movies are to me: There's a fair amount of interesting stuff, but the overall story of each movie itself isn't particularly great, and I just figure that there was a lot more on the page that make the stories worth telling... the details that suck one into the adventure and make it such a treat.

Word 'round the campfire is that Zack Snyder already has an extra half-hour's worth of footage ready to be reinserted into the film for the "director's cut" edition on DVD - all the stuff that he fought the studio (and lost) to try and include - so I suspect we might be seeing the news vendor and the kid, at least.

I've heard VERY encouraging things about Rorschach, from both fans of Moore and newcomers to Watchmen. It occurs to me that, in some sense, CSFB! is the non-right-wing, non-misogynistic (and hopefully non-hygiene-challenged) version of Rorschach.

It's enjoyable if you can separate the book from the movie and not always be comparing the two. I got a thrill seeing some of my favorite scenes come to life, and yes, a little letdown when some other favorite scenes were either left out, changed or just fell flat.

It was its own creature though. Undeniably inferior to the book, but very entertaining in its own limited way if you can accept it for what it is.... which is, pretty much the best possible adaptation of a graphic novel that is at its core unfilmable.

I have a bunch of complaints that aren't fair considering the limitations of placing this beast on the silver-screen. My only REAL complaint that could have been avoided, was I didn't care for the slow motion shots and the large, over-the-top *THWACK* sound effects every time a fight occurred. I thought it should have been done in a more low-key, realistic way, keeping more instep with Moore's "heroes in a real world" motif. I think Greengrass would have done a better job with the fights (look at his documentary-esque footage of the fights with the hijackers in United 93... no loud sounds, no crazy contortions of the body, no blurring effects, no slow motion.... just two bodies slamming hard into each other).

Besides that relatively minor complaint, Snyder did the best job one could do in adapting this.