Wow.

I feel like I just attended a master class in storytelling and screenwriting… and most of it was way over my head.

I’m not going to say anything more about it other than it is just an unqualified masterpiece, and of course you absolutely need to have read this before the movie comes out. Nevermind that the story is so dark and gritty and at times bone-chilling that I can’t imagine a Hollywood flick living up to it; Watchmen is the first comic or graphic novel where I didn’t flip the pages quickly, at reading pace, as if it were a storyboard, and I think Moore is spot on when he rejects the very idea of an adaptation (well, now that I’ve read him, I realize he’s evidently smart enough to know what he’s talking about):

en.wikipedia.org

Moore told Graydon about his response [to Terry Gilliam], "I had to tell him that, frankly, I didn’t think it was filmable. I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn’t."

Moore also told Entertainment Weekly in December 2001, "With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there. You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you’re being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."