Fanboys agree: If you don’t like the book, you probably won’t like the movie.

When it comes to Watchmen, it is impossible for me to be an unbiased or even level-headed reviewer. I am, unabashedly, a full-fledged “fanboy” regarding Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel.

Having read the book over and over, each time feeling more and more slobberknocked by its complex, interlocking structure and carefully crafted plotlines involving the deepest and darkest philosophical and moral conundrums (pretentious but true), I have concluded that Watchmen, the graphic novel, is my favorite non-film narrative… ever. (Cue the sneers toward my hyperbole.)

As a cinephile, however, much of my appreciation of Watchmen, the graphic novel, comes from my observance of its highly cinematic qualities: movement, angles, juxtaposition, rhythm, visual rhyme, lighting, and framing (not to mention the various cinematic influences on the book’s storytelling from film noir to Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Taxi Driver (1976)). The whole graphic novel is perhaps the closest thing to a movie-on-a-page I have ever experienced, existing in a creative sphere that is just as informed by cinema (if not more) than it is comic books – paradise for a nerd like me who wishes he could sit around and read movies when he isn’t watching them.

Herein lies the predicament of my writing about the cinematic adaptation of Watchmen – I’ve been adapting it for the screen in my head from the very first time I read it. The book was always waiting to be a movie; it only made sense. This, of course, is not true for everyone (as I have been repeatedly informed by the film’s detractors).

Therefore, I come to this review as a “fanboy”/film critic in a mild identity crisis. How can I write about this film judging it solely on its cinematic merits when I judged the beloved inked source material, in many ways, based on its cinematic merits? Should I write as if I were not familiar with the graphic novel, like many viewers and reviewers, or should I write as the avid fan that I am? If Watchmen has always existed for me in at least a proto-cinematic realm, how can I express the inevitability and desirability for a filmic adaptation to someone for whom this is not the case? How do I concretely differentiate between a cinematic graphic-novel and a comic book-like movie?

Okay, okay. This is getting neurotic. You get my point. Extracting my personal investment in Watchmen from my critical perspective is as impossible as it is pointless. I could argue about the validity of its themes, the depth of its characterization, the myriad contradictory conclusions and implications found within its story – all of the elements that can be found in the source material that mean so much to me. However, what I want to attempt to discuss here are the differences between the print and screen versions of Watchmen: what makes the movie more or less successful than the graphic novel and what, if anything, gives it a creative life of its own.