I think that your criticism of "fanboys" is unwarranted in this case.
most people who disliked Watchmen, are the big movie buffs who simply thought the source material did not make for a very good movie.
Watchmen was the 2nd most faithful Comic Adaptation EVER. Sin City is the only one that is more true to the comic.
both of these movies were literally right off the page, nearly shot-for-shot. the major changes in Watchmen were made in interest of updating the comic with the times, and didn't really even change things as much as you think. the nuclear weapon plot, and the ending(in the comic book, at the end, dude drops a giant octopus monster on NYC, rather than the atomic bombs all over the world like in the movie.) the change to the ending was widely accepted as necessary by "fanboys", as the giant octopus monster thing would ber very outdated seeing that the comic was written in like the 80s or early 90s.
I am a Alan Moore fan and the Watchmen is probably my favorite graphic novel of all time. I can't really speak to the criticisms of the movie compared to the "bible," because I have yet to see the film, mainly because I have been trying to see it in Imax and/or wait for the DVD release (which I will explain in a sec). I am aware of the criticisms, though, and there have been generally positive reviews from the watchmen world in regards to the adaptation, but just like any adaptation there is something lost in the transition. I have heard the cinematography of the movie is closely matched to the frame by frame sequences and from what I have read of Zak Snyder's interviews (the director), this was a main focus.
I am weary to watch the movie for two reasons, both of them are other Alan Moore works. The first, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, was absolutely butchered by Hollywood, who turned a spectacular graphic novel into a piece of steaming crap. The second, V for Vendetta, was a shell of the actual GN and nowhere close to what the original was. The Waschoski brothers attempted to turn Vendetta, originally written in the 1980s, into a modern script aimed at the abuses of George W. Bush. The story line was butchered and amended over and over, the characters were changed and omitted. V for Vendetta is probably the second best graphic novel ever made, but it's soul was ripped out by the aberration of a movie. Those that have never read the novel may have been fine with the movie, but those that HAVE read the novel wouldn't be able to stomach the adaptation.
Now for the second reason, which comes back to Alan Moore himself. His comics were made as written material because he believed that was the only format that could properly display the structure needed for the story. A driving force in the Watchman novel is the side story that runs concurrent with the main story about a colonial villager who returns home to find his town pillaged by pirates and his wife/child murdered. He then sets out to find the pirates, eventually becoming one of the crew in the end because of his lust for revenge and blood. The themes in the sub-plot accentuate the themes in the main plot. Luckily, with the DVD release they will have a cartoon attached of this sub-plot.
I have probably ranted enough about this, but I would love to see a successful adaptation one of these days of a great graphic novel, but don't find it very possible in the realm of big-budget hollywood. Below is an excerpt from the Watchmen author, Alan Moore, on the change of mediums and also the link to the whole interview (which is a good read for anyone interested in Moore).
Moore: No. Otherwise I'd have done them in another medium. I really don't think that The League would—well, it could have worked. There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of The League. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don't believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite. The things I was trying to instill in those books were generally things that were only appropriate to the comics medium.
They were only about the comics medium, in a certain sense. To transplant them to the screen is going to chop off a good 30 or 40 percent of the reason why I wanted to do the work in the first place.
...
I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances. There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on "multiple platforms," as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned.
I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.
....
One thing is that with the comics medium, it has been proven—I believe by Pentagon tests in the late '80s—that comics are actually the best medium for imparting information to somebody in a form that they will retain and remember. That's not just me saying that, that's the Pentagon. I personally feel—and this is just pseudo-scientific hippie bullcrap—I feel this might be because the unit of currency of what used to be called our left brain is the word. Our left brain is what goes about speech and rationality. The unit of currency for our right brain, conversely, would be the image, because the right brain is preverbal.
So perhaps it is because of the combination of words and images in a readable form that comics does have this unique power. Now, of course, movies are a combination of words and images, but they have a completely different structure and completely different way of working. With a movie you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames a second. With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier.
more here for those interested:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa
