Eh, to note I am expressing an opinion and I certainly respect yours, but I need to tackle this.
@Demon:
I LOVED Watchmen, it is the absolute best book to film adaptation I've ever seen.
Lines were lifted directly from the book, the story was perfectly intact, and the actors portrayed their parts perfectly. Rorschach being the standout.
How is lifting lines directly from the comic a plus? Anybody can do that, it doesn't take talent, what does take talent is making changes yet keeping true to the spirit of the novel.
And disagree with you the story being perfectly intact, it was essentially a condensed bloated version of a much complexer work, with pretty visuals.
Supering up much of the cast, with Snyder cartoonish hyper violence, butchering the ending(I'm not talking about the squid) acting was pretty bad in some places especially the one for Laurie, and also not to mention the fact that the one playing her mother was younger than her! The makeup is noticeable. Night Owl's Darth Vader moment when Rorschach kicks the bucket was pretty cheesy, and something about Snyder's direction kinda takes away the mystery of the novel. The music choices are mindbogglingly terrible, and sometimes don't fit with a scene at all.
I'll give it points: I liked the opening, and it is by far the most visually gripping comic adaption I've seen. But It fails on a spiritual level as an adaption of the novel and more importantly it fails as a standalone film for me.
300 is E-X-A-C-T-L-Y the same as the book. The only difference is the movie actually added the subplot with the Queen fighting the council for help for her husband. The overall plot is pretty much a panel-for-panel. So if you hated the movie, you hated the comic too.
Faithfulness is not always an indicator of the quality of an adaption. Some of my fav movies that are adaptions are not a slave to the source material they are based on. Than again. 300 isn't so great to begin with and its pretty much all visuals, and is a shallow action story but one can improve upon the source material, something Snyder didn't.
My point is, he does adaptation well
.
He does adaptions well visually.
I think with good source material for Supes lead by strong support from Nolan this will be awesome.
To be fair, he hasn't really proven himself he can handle this type of adaption, the examples you listed are direct adaptions of a single story while this film is an adaption of a character with many stories, and many different interpretations Unlike either Watchmen or 300, it won't be a direct adaption.
He will prove himself with this film.