There are two ways you can go when filming a comic book movie these days: adaptation or recreation. For the big franchise heroes with an immense amount of history behind them, adaptation has worked well at re-introducing the movie-going public to iconic characters. You open yourself up to lots of bitching by comic fanboys when you condense or expand too much outside of accepted continuity, but directors like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) have done a fine job of re-introducing the classics to a new, and huge, audience.
Start recreating movies from stand-alone graphic novels — like 2007's muscle-bound 300 — and directors are faced with both a simpler and more difficult path. In many cases, the dialogue can be pulled straight from word boxes and the scenes are already story-boarded by the original artist. All that's left is making it look consistent with the original, and making tough choices about what to change.
Zack Snyder's Watchmen is a competent — if not inspired — recreation of Alan Moore's seminal piece of superhero deconstruction. When problems do show up, it's usually the result of Snyder's choices outside of the source material.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.