I suppose I should start by saying I have not only read the original book, but I am in fact a huge comic books geek up to the point of making pretentious Lit-Crit statements about things like this. So forgive me that trespass. :)
I thought the movie was pretty good, but I think one thing that was hurt a lot in the adaptation was that for some reason they made Laurie/Silk Spectre a much less compelling character. That aside, the point of Watchmen when it was originally published was essentially an anti-fascist story. One thing you might note is that rarely are these "super-heroes" actually saving anyone. The only one who ever seems to be doing anything approaching crime-fighting is Rorschach, and even then it's the post-crime vengeance sort. Watchmen intentionally presents super-heroes as normal people with very, very serious issues. They aren't conventional heroes and you aren't even necessarily supposed to be rooting for them. You aren't supposed to cheer because the Comedian tried to rape a teammate, or because he killed a Vietnamese woman who was pregnant thanks to him. It's supposed to show you that he was a terrible, terrible person, that despite being a "hero" he was actually an evil bastard. And that teammate later cheating on her husband with him? Again, the older Silk Spectre isn't exactly Mother Teresa. She has her own issues. The only really sympathetic characters are Dan/Nite Owl and Laurie/Silk Spectre, and even they're a little socially maladjusted. It's a story about screwed-up people with too much power and what they do to the world because of it.
Just as the original book was intended to be viewed in the context of the super-hero genre as a whole, the movie only really works as a juxtaposition to all the other super-hero movies that have been coming out lately. And even then it's much better as an adaptation of the book then it is as a movie itself. The characters are meant to be, to varying degrees, psychopaths, because that's a likely if rather pessimistic outcome if we really did allow vigilantes to be our heroes like they are in fiction.
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I thought the movie was pretty good, but I think one thing that was hurt a lot in the adaptation was that for some reason they made Laurie/Silk Spectre a much less compelling character. That aside, the point of Watchmen when it was originally published was essentially an anti-fascist story. One thing you might note is that rarely are these "super-heroes" actually saving anyone. The only one who ever seems to be doing anything approaching crime-fighting is Rorschach, and even then it's the post-crime vengeance sort. Watchmen intentionally presents super-heroes as normal people with very, very serious issues. They aren't conventional heroes and you aren't even necessarily supposed to be rooting for them. You aren't supposed to cheer because the Comedian tried to rape a teammate, or because he killed a Vietnamese woman who was pregnant thanks to him. It's supposed to show you that he was a terrible, terrible person, that despite being a "hero" he was actually an evil bastard. And that teammate later cheating on her husband with him? Again, the older Silk Spectre isn't exactly Mother Teresa. She has her own issues. The only really sympathetic characters are Dan/Nite Owl and Laurie/Silk Spectre, and even they're a little socially maladjusted. It's a story about screwed-up people with too much power and what they do to the world because of it.
Just as the original book was intended to be viewed in the context of the super-hero genre as a whole, the movie only really works as a juxtaposition to all the other super-hero movies that have been coming out lately. And even then it's much better as an adaptation of the book then it is as a movie itself. The characters are meant to be, to varying degrees, psychopaths, because that's a likely if rather pessimistic outcome if we really did allow vigilantes to be our heroes like they are in fiction.