As for "Watchmen", I think the problem is that they made it into one single movie. It should have been at least two movies imo. It was obvious to me they just tried to cram too much and didn't have enough time to make a credible movie. That's my take on it anyways.
if they had just "used the comic as a script" they might have even had enough film to cut it into 3 movies instead of just 2
that's how freaking long the fucking book is
for me personally, i would have considered just "using the comic as a script" filming the entire book, and any editing/alternate scenes/extra scenes to be filmed after that
the studio wasn't going to cut it into multiple movies like Peter Jackson's LOTR, because it just wasn't popular enough
if they would have just 'used the comic as a script" they definately would have had enough film to make it into an HBO mini-series
but having said all that
i like the changes, when Rorschach escapes prison, in the book, laurie and dan see him without his mask, and he's got to go get his "spare face" from inside his apartment, where he has a confrontation with his female landlord, in the movie, this is changed to him getting his mask back from Malcolm Long and it's done in a way that looks awesome
also
Dr Manhattan's dialogue is horrible in the book and fixed in the movie, mentioning the nuclear war in the very first Dr Manhattan scene allowing for editing out the extraneous characters that are reading newspapers
Dan Drieberg being friends with Viedt and going nuts at the end, is done well, it makes Drieberg look like a much more well developed character than he is in the book
Rorschach killing the kidnapper is done differently in the movie, i like the movie version of the killing better
the only things in the movie that were edited out were the extraneous characters, Manhattan mentions "nuclear war" early enough that we don't need to see people reading news papers, hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis being a couple, and Silhouette being a lesbian are shown, but the modern-day lesbian couple are edited out, becuase it was a movie, not a mini-series,
in the book, Malcolm Long's black wife has white friends and is totally afraid of other black people, in the movie Malcolm's wife, her white friends, the specific black guy that Mrs Long is afraid of, and the white guy that she wrongfully accuses of being a white supremacist, are completely edited out, because it was a movie, not a mini-series
in the book, Sally Jupiter doesn't have a normally functioning sex drive, when straight men think she's "sexy" she interprets this as men thinking she's "beautiful" (like during Eddie Blake's funeral where Sally and Laurie are arguing about the "Mexican porno comic" that has Sally in it) but when lesbians think she's sexy, she gets freaked out, because she knows nothing about dildos or cunnilingus and doesn't understand how "sex" happens "without a penis" Sally loves hanging out with gay men because they won't try to have sex with her, when Sally becomes a celebrity she "publicly dates" the male celebrities that are "in the closet"
she's already married to her manager when she gets pregnant with Laurie, in the movie, Sally's husband knows that Eddie Blake is the father of his wife's kid and he's pissed about it, in the book Sally's husband never has sex with Sally because he's gay, but Sally's husband being gay isn't mentioned in the movie
in the movie Laurie figures out that Eddie Blake is her biological father and the audience is kinda wondering why Sally would let Eddie have sex with her exactly 5 years after Eddie tried to rape her
in the comic, when Laurie figures out that Eddie Blake is her biological father, the audience realizes that Eddie and Sally were really close friends before he tried to rape her, Sally has no sex drive, and that the day Laurie was conceived was the one-and-only-time that Sally Jupiter has ever had a penis inside her vagina, Sally's lack of sex drive is the real reason she has a problem with Laurie dating Manhattan, but when Manhattan leaves earth for the final time, and Laurie's dating Dan Drieberg, Sally's okay with it because she has a kind of epiphany moment where she realizes she's abnormal, and she realizes that a normal woman has a sex drive just as strong as a man's
all of this is edited out of the movie, because it was a movie, not a mini-series, the edits were really just for time
except the squid at the end being changed to a bomb
the squid at the end of the comic was consistent with what was going on in superhero comics at the time the Watchmen comic was written
but the squid was changed to a bomb at the end of the movie, so that the movie would make sense to the people that haven't read the superhero comics that were written in the first half of the 1980's
even if it were a mini-series instead of a movie, i think i would have preferred the bomb instead of the squid
