Alan Moore is an AMAZING writer. He is probably the most gifted writer to ever touch the comic book medium. The Watchmen was one of the best graphic novels ever - if not the best.
That being said, there is something about comic books that fails to translate well into movie medium. Maybe it’s that in a comic book, you can kind of skip forward and backward, and in the movie, it’s all one stream. I thought Alan Moore’s V For Vandetta was an awesome comic book - the movie sucked. I thought Hellblazer, the character he created that became the Constaintine movie - was awesome. But the movie? Ick.
The Watchmen has the potentional to be the BEST movie of 2009 hands down. I’ll be there to see it no matter what.
Alan Moore is a master at his chosen medium, and Watchmen is a masterpiece of the comic medium. It and Dark Knight Returns gained an enormous amount of respect for the medium, and proved it was not just a format for kids, that it was a medium of storytelling equal to film, stage, or novels.
The format of Watchmen itself was deliberately designed to enhance the comic medium, to tell a story beyond what could be done on film or stage. The story contains comic books within comic books, stories within stories, and extra literary material at the back of each chapter. It was written to be read and re-read as you wait for the next issue. Even this faithful reproduction to film can't contain the whole story. (Which causes a not insignificant number of fans to say why bother make a film at all, as if making a film "legitimizes" the story)
The only medium that could containn Watchmen besides comic books is a multimedia website, which did not exist at the time it was written. And while millions of websites have been created, and billions of dollars spent and made on the web, the web still hasn't had an Alan Moore come along and push it to its limit, to legitimize it as a story telling medium.