I've read the comic, saw the film last wednesday... It is definately not your average superhero movie... but then again I never thought it was going to be.
The one thing that will possibly put off most people off this film I think is that it's not really as much a film trying to be a comic as it is a comic trying to be a film (I know that doesn't make much sense, but see the movie and maybe you will see what I mean). For a few minutes the dialogue confused me, as the actors appeared to be very limited in their acting.. as if they were stating their lines more than saying them.
Then I realised that they were actually behaving as they would if they were comic characters that had been somehow halfway transformed into movie characters: their lines were much longer than they would have been in a comic (although in some places the dialogue/scenes were straight out of the comic), but you could kind of tell that they weren't completely transformed either: there was some sort of comic like quality that remained (think somewhere between early batman series and actual acting).
Or, I could be completely wrong about this, and they were all just lousy actors
I thought the movie was good, it stuck with the comic storyline very well but wasn't afraid to adapt certain things to make sure that the story was still relevant (cars dont' seem to be all electric for instance, like they are in the comic, and nobody smokes.. which I guess was a political decision seeing as quite a few of the characters in the comic smokes, and even a key event in the comic that involved smoking had been rewritten to cut out the smoking part. (Ok, maybe it wasn't 'key', but it was certainly high profile enough to make me notice when it didn't happen)
The only thing that disapointed me was that some things appeared to be a bit 'cut', almost as if someone had decided after the film was ready that they wanted to remove 45min of material and went about cutting it away where they thought no one would notice. I've heard rumors regarding a directors cut with 30 min more footage. In this case I think it might be a case of putting stuff back in rather than padding out.
of course, it is also possible that some of the things I noticed in the theater; lack of smoking, leccy cars, etc, was only due to the fact that those things had been cut out.
I'm off to my local Borders bookshop in glasgow tomorrow to have my copy of the Watchmen comic signed by David Gibbons (the guy that drew the comic.. and did backgrounds for Beneath a Steel Sky, if anyone has ever played that game).. If anyone is interested in meeting up in the queue I'll be the really tall guy with the red somewhat high visibility jacket and red TWA bag.