I don’t think Watchmen is impossible to adapt to film: The last couple decades of blockbuster superhero movies—and, arguably, the concurrent, increasing irrelevance of “mainstream” comics in the development of the “graphic novel”—might suggest to us that the superhero’s new natural home is on the big screen. It should have been possible to make the movie version of Watchmen a commentary on superhero movies in the same spirit as how the original was a commentary on comics.

That’s not the movie the director set out to make. Zack Snyder clearly has respect for the source material; in some ways, it’s a little too faithful an adaptation, with not enough changed or omitted to play to this different medium’s different strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just take a serialized story with a natural rhythm, provided by page and chapter breaks, and condense it into a 2.5-hour movie. Watching each character go through flashbacks during the Comedian’s funeral reminded me of how that technique has been used to good effect on Lost, leaving me to feel like this could have been done better as television. Of the changes and additions that were made, some made great sense to me (e.g., replacing the “squid” with something else quite logical), while others felt like they ironically undercut the intentions of the original work (e.g., excessive use of music in dramatic scenes, slow-motion in moments better presented at an even rhythm, and a sex scene so drawn out and reminiscent of softcore porn that I’m almost willing to give credit for being intentionally awkward). In short, this was an ambitious, well-intentioned failure, but at least it was no LXG.