On "Watchmen"

It's been a while, perhaps I should work up a schedule of sorts.

I recently saw Watchmen, and have been thinking a great deal about it. While it was somewhat disappointing, it is probably the best comic book adaptation yet put to screen.

There were several thematic elements that I thought about more than others, so bear with me for a moment:

• The studio cut Laurie's (Silk Spectre II's) smoking. This might not seem like a major feature, but it was a defining feature of her character in the graphic novel: she was always trying to quit cold turkey, and something would always happen to break her resolve. It made her more human. This was cut by the studios, who have essentially decided that only foreigners and villains smoke.
• The decision to remove functioning electric cars from the back story was a poor choice: it allowed them to talk about fossil fuels (and American dependence thereupon), but it also removed the primary display of Dr. Manhattan's god-like abilities: he can create lithium at will, thus making its availability a moot point, thus removing the problem with electric vehicles.

This isn't a fanboy ranting about how "they changed it, now it sucks" (you would've heard more about how the script was unfair to Rorschach and Jackie Earle Haley, who played him, and might be the best of the performers in the movie.) There are narrative elements that were misused in the execution of the film.

Anyway, it was a good adaptation, and most of the cuts made to the story were very utilitarian. Those two points above, however, seemed problematic to me and did not have a satisfactory explanation or placeholder. It seems that, in an effort to be "topical" (fossil fuels) and "correct" (smoking), they injured the story.