There was a Watchmen screening last night at 7:30 PM. Before getting there early, we picked up our Taco Bell on the way making it an official Blog Outside The Bun event. We weren’t allowed to bring recording devices and we had to turn our phones off, but seriously, Taco Bell made Watchmen that much better.

Even without Taco Bell though, Watchmen was an all around good movie. It did a great job holding true to the source material, and a lot of the imagery translated well from the book to the movie. Some of the sub-plots were lost, but there are nods to them all over the place.

Watchmen as a movie was kind of cool. To a person that has never read the book, the pacing was a little bit slow and story was slightly difficult to follow, but generally, it wasn’t bad. It had a lot of action, it was well directed and the acting was great, but obviously it couldn’t convey everything the book ultimately did.

A surprising but terribly satisfying aspect of the Watchmen movie was that it was gritty. It was dirty, gory, bloody and it portrayed the overall tone of Watchmen perfectly. Bones were broken, plenty of people died and there was oh so very much blood. Anything less than an R rating would never have done this movie justice.

Another important thing to mention is the music featured in the movie. It was all true to the period and a lot of it was alluded to in the book, but at times, it felt like a crazy mashup. The movie has a great soundtrack, but the songs together make for a slightly confusing feel. The music in the movie had trouble translating into something that felt coherent and carefully pieced together.

Among some of the things missing from the movie were the Black Freighter series, Veidt cigarettes, sugar cubes and alien squids. Some of these things make an appearance in the movie, but only if you know what to look for. There’s a Black Freighter poster in place of the Lesbian Rights poster and if you look real close you see a few Knot Tops here and there. The absence of these things take absolutely nothing from the movie, but the addition of them really shows Zack Snyder’s devotion to fans of the series.

As fans of the work, it was easy to tell that Zack Snyder did his best to touch on everything in the book, even if briefly. Fans will notice quite a few nods to the original book that take nothing away from the casual viewer. Watchmen seemed impossible to translate to the big screen, but Zack did a better job than anyone else ever could have.