I don’t think I’ve ever done a movie review here before, but Watchmen seems to merit it.

In June 1991, Watchmen rocked my world. It was the summer after my sophomore year, and I’d borrowed the graphic novel from a fellow student at my all-girls high school who also had a summer job at the amusement park where I worked.

Watchmen was violent. Unlike anything I’d read before. It was shocking.

I knew how important it was, though. It changed everything I thought I knew about superheroes. I could never again look the same way at my childhood favorites, Batman and Spider-Man. In fact, I began to seek out darker, more complex characters, such as Wolverine and Spawn. Heck, the book even colored the way I viewed characters in non-graphic-novel novels.

But I never thought anybody could make a film of it. I mean, I’m rarely a fan of film adaptations of my favorite books anyway (which is why I’m so resistant to the idea of anyone making films of Octavia Butler’s work), but I had a special animus against the idea of a Watchmen film.

“It’s too messy,” I’d say. “There are too many storylines.”

“There’s no way to avoid making Dr. Manhattan look cheesy, and a cheesy Dr. Manhattan would destroy the film’s integrity.”

And finally: “Watchmen‘s time has passed. Nobody wants to see it now.”

So it’s fair to say that I approached the news of this movie and its ultimate existence with both unparalleled anticipation and dread.

I shouldn’t have worried so much.

No, it’s not Casablanca, or even The Dark Knight, but I didn’t expect it to be.

It was, though, as good a film version of Watchmen as could possibly have been made.

I was right that there’s no way of getting everything from the graphic novel onscreen. The movie would’ve been six hours long. Director Zack Snyder did a masterful job of picking and choosing the right elements to showcase (and ‘bravo’ to him for going with the ix-nay on the id-squay), though. His opening credits were brilliant, too.

If I’ve got nits to pick with any of his choices, they’re mostly inconsequential: the sex scenes were a touch too Cinemax Late Night, and I actually wish he’d chosen less evocative, less famous, less obvious tunes to bolster his soundtrack. My husband, who never did finish the book before we saw the film, was amused to note that the New York City of Watchmen the movie and Watchmen the book had few people of color (although the film included two black people who are minor presences in the original book).

Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach was mesmerizing. Likewise, my hometown boy Patrick Wilson at showing how Dan Dreiberg was only truly alive and in control when in his Nite Owl get-up. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian captured exactly how repellant and yet cruelly, disturbingly attractive a man who had no illusions — about himself or the world — could be. The sorely underrated Carla Gugino shone as Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre I, too.

However, Malin Akerman was wildly miscast as Silk Spectre II. Her dead line readings were a travesty. With her long, black wig, she also reminded me of Lucy Lawless, and I kept wondering why Lawless hadn’t been cast instead. I just didn’t buy Akerman as a woman in her late 30s who had spent years stagnating intellectually as the kept woman of a gigantic blue genius and who longed for the relative excitement of her crime-fighting youth. If not Lawless, couldn’t Parker Posey have pulled this off (I’m sure she’s not that expensive, either) and seemed a little less Valley-Girl-y, too?

I really hate it when too-young women are cast in roles that clearly require someone who’s had a few more summers since the senior prom. Upon review of her IMDB profile, it seems Akerman’s actually 30-ish, but I think my analysis still stands. She came off much younger and somehow, less than I thought Laurie/Silk Spectre II needed to be.

Speaking of Silk Spectre II, yay for Billy Crudup’s Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan! I loved everything about him. He was what I wanted in the character I’d been animating in my head for nearly 20 years. I loved his struggle to remain connected to humanity, I loved his struggle with his feelings for Laurie. The voice was perfect, and I didn’t hate the way he looked. In case you’re wondering, by the way: Yes, my inner 12-year-old did in fact giggle when I first saw Dr. Manhattan’s gigantic circumcised blue junk.

The less said about Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt, the better. Here was a guy who looked like he should be the victim of random, anonymous pantsings and ass-kickings, possibly at the hands of fourth graders. I know the look is part of the character, but something about Goode’s performance annoyed, and it wasn’t anything I could’ve anticipated before I’d seen the film.

Will Watchmen be the Biggest Movie of All Time? Nah. It won’t even be the biggest comic book movie of all time.

But it was a worthy effort, with workmanlike execution.

Grade: C+