SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses plot elements of both the graphic novel and movie versions of “Watchmen.”

At long last Zack Snyder’s ambitious and heavily anticipated film version of the legendary graphic novel “Watchmen” has premiered, and at this writing has topped the weekend box office with $55 million in ticket sales.

Our review will be short: It was mesmerizing, everything we hoped it would be and we can’t wait to see it again.

Besides, for fans of the original graphic novel who were eagerly awaiting Snyder’s interpretation, despite writer Alan Moore’s disavowal of the film, reviews of “Watchmen” are pretty much irrelevant.

The main question seems to be: How faithful would Snyder be to the source material and would that faithfulness harm or enhance the viewing experience?

Well, the purpose of this post is not only to applaud Snyder for his downright obsessive faithfulness to the book, but also to tread into the realm of the blasphemous. In other words, we’d like to list a few elements of the “Watchmen” film that we feel were superior to the sacred tome.

1. Rorschach: The ink-blot-masked vigilante is the heart of the original graphic novel and his unwillingness to compromise when truth would suffer, even if it means saving the world, provides the book’s soul. As far as we’re concerned the success or failure of a “Watchmen” movie rested on the masked man’s trenchcoated shoulders. Jackie Earle Haley succeeded in his portrayal to a degree that elevated the character from his depiction in the comic. That’s no mean feat when you spend most of the film behind a mask. But in that brief, maskless time during which Rorschach is the seemingly nondescript Walter Kovacs, Haley provides an important spark of life at the same time he maintains an emotionless front. Compared to Kovacs’ soulless, lifeless stare in the comic version, it’s a vastly different depiction, but a wise choice as far as we’re concerned.
2. The Comedian: Our point is similar to the above argument about Rorschach. Jeffrey Dean Morgan brings a — pardon the pun — three-dimensionality to Edward Blake, aka The Comedian, that we didn’t know we didn’t get from the print version until we saw the movie. Morgan ably conveys everything that’s needed — coldheartedness, evilness, pain, awareness, despair, irony and sadness — even when wearing a domino mask.
3. The left-out stuff: We hate to say this, but the movie didn’t suffer with the loss of “Tales of the Black Freighter,” the comic book within a comic book that served as a metaphor for the paranoia and obsession controlling the world in the book’s version of Cold War 1985. Nor did it suffer with the loss of some of the other subplots and narrative flourishes found in the book (Hollis Mason’s death; the personal life of Kovacs’ psychiatrist, etc.). Also, we were glad to see much of the smoking removed. Several of the characters, particularly the females, smoked like chimneys in the book. In the movie, only The Comedian does much smoking.
4. The ending: We won’t go much into spoiler territory here, only to say that the choice used as an alternative to the infamous Giant Squid from the book was brilliant and, when you really think about it, made much more sense than the elaborate project in the print version. (Still, did you see the “Squid” in-joke/easter egg in the film?)