I disagree. I don't think I've seen a film that replicates the tone, feel and look of it's source material as well as this does.
I watched it only a few days after reading the comic. It was like taking the same medicine, only in liquid rather than tablet form.
The film felt as empty as the comic, whose philosophical and political points are cliched and simplistic - the kind you read daubed on the walls of a university toilet. It's a pose, a pose that, when you set it in a real context (parallel timeline - Nixon ,Vietnam, Cold War etc.), has no resonance: the world was not and is not like that. There are heroes and good people everywhere, and love and profound emotion.
What we have here are some navel-gazing vigilantes tediously musing on their broken lives/souls while trying to save a world that they don't actually seem that bothered about, a world we are given only cynical and stereotypical glimpses of: rioters, paedophiles, the Doctor's selfish wife, the onlookers during a rape/murder.
Nite Owl's reaction to the massacre - putting his hand to his chin and thinking a bit - sums up the whole exercise, I think. The snide, offhand way it has with its Hiroshima allegory (Laurie's comment: "that's all they wanted, tandoori to go") is particularly irritating too.
It is a comic made to impress: with its twist on the superhero myth (hardly revolutionary), with its oh-so-learned use of popular and classical culture references (Dylan, Alexander, Juvenal, Jung etc.), its sub-noir language and so on. The book doesn't seem to care about anybody or anything. The Watchmen are impotent, the people are sinful and the world will die whatever. We are doomed blah blah blah.
I never felt invested in aims and motives. The potential is there for a moving epic yet the plot, world and characters never cohere. Soulless.
Moments stick with me: The origin of Rorschach's 'face' in the comic and his brilliant portrayal in the film; the scene on Mars; the Comedian almost pleading with those around him to save him from himself (not as well put across in the comic); vivid and lucid imagery; use of recurring symbols give it a fateful/playful mood....
Hurrm.