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Are spoilers ok in here? There may be some in what follows, but I'll try to avoid anything really specific.
I will say that it is a very faithful adaptation of the novel. It does capture the look very well and pretty much if it is in the book it is in the movie. Obviously not every panel or word but pretty much all the foibles, quirks, and issues are touched upon.
And this makes it only a mediocre movie at best. I suspect I would have hated it if I weren't familiar with the book. Books can cover territory with a scope that just isn't feasible in a single standalone movie. Watchmen is essentially a half-dozen creation stories rolled into one thing with a minimal of plot driving things along until the very end when that minimal plot expands into something so big as to overwhelm what came before.
In moving Watchmen to film they apparently said "how do we fulfill the letter of the novel even if the spirit doesn't survive" when the question should always (in my never particularly humble opinion) be "how do we translate the spirit of the novel knowing that the body can't survive."
The literal approach of the movie would have worked much better as a 10-episode HBO series (I know, that is hardly an original thought). As it is, I quite honestly looked down at my watch at one point and thought "oh my god, we're about 100 minutes in and Rorschach isn't even in jail yet." Fortunately, the prison stuff is something that got cut back on. If nothing else the sex scene needed to be cut, I don't think giggling was the intended response to that.
Anyway, it just barely kept my interest throughout, and there were some crazy awesome visuals. But even when taken from graphic novels, movies are a different medium than books and tough decisions need to be made.
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