[spoiler alert: full plot details of both film and comic versions are discussed]

Any film adaptation is automatically a mixed blessing: the chance to see some beloved story translated from a book/comic/radio show/TV show/videogame to the big screen, counterbalanced by the risk that it will get fundamentally ruined in the process. Of these, the trials of moving from books to movies are probably best established—massive plot compression, reduced complexity, characters that don’t “look right,” jettisoning of descriptive language—but comic adaptations are a much newer phenomenon with their own pitfalls. To begin, one might argue that Watchmen is only the second true conversion (what in videogame terms might be called a “total conversion” from mod culture), following Frank Miller’s Sin City, with most other superhero and even explicitly comic book movies often closer to “inspired by” or “featuring characters from” than outright transfers from actual comic runs or specific graphic novels[1]. Even previous efforts to adapt Alan Moore in League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, and Watchmen director Zach Snyder’s previous outing with Frank Miller’s 300, diverged quite widely from the source material. By contrast, Sin City was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the Dark Horse series. But even it suffered in the process of combining multiple short story arcs into an attempt to create a coherent longer film, and from the innate limitations of the flat-affect noir patois in which it was composed. Watchmen was conceived first as a 12-part comic run and then collected as a graphic novel, ostensibly providing a more linear narrative to put into a film script. Once the initial jitters that the material would be handled indelicately had passed (Snyder went out of the way to reassure fans), the more apropos question became: does Watchmen even work as a movie? With Snyder’s Watchmen, we have a vastly ambitious attempt to convert what has been called an “unfilmable” work into celluloid. How well viewers think the effort turned out is breaking down along traditional party lines, with mainstream critics bothered by its structure, pulp excesses, and even its slavish devotion to the text (cf. the first two Harry Potter films); and fans thrilled to see familiar scenes brought to life. At the risk of rehashing overchurned ground, I think the movie succeeds and fails precisely by those measures and your ultimate enjoyment will be determined how much you give credence to each. Let’s start with the structure.
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As the article itself states, "The title is all the intro you should need."

Why Superman Will Always Suck – Bam! Kapow!

The argument against Superman as a sympathetic character is just as appropriate for any overpowered hero, such as the cited ‘Burly Brawl’ between Neo and the mob of Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded.

As counterexamples, however, excluding Kingdom Come (which also comes in for bashing at the article’s end) the notion of Superman has seen some  compelling permutations via conceits like Elseworlds. A few include JLA’s The Nail, wherein a nail punctures the tire of the Kents and prevents them from reaching the infant Kal-El first, who is instead raised among the Amish; Red Son, where he is raised in the Soviet Union instead of the US; and the revamped Squadron Supreme (released as Supreme Power) parallel universe where an invulnerable alien foundling is raised under strict government control to become Hyperion. Two more meta alternatives are Secret Identity, where a smalltown teen has the misfortune of being named ‘Clark Kent’ in a world raised on Superman comics…until he suddenly develops real powers; and It’s a Bird, an autobiographical tale of a new writer (Steven Seagle) deciding how to tackle such as iconic character with any meaningful modern perspective.

For related Superman entertainment, there’s always the quintessential essay by Larry Niven about the myriad obstacles facing his sex life – "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" – that recalls engineering disproofs of Santa Claus which feature reindeer traveling 3,000 times the speed of sound.

More recent fare can be found in the Michael Chabon’s piece "Secret Skin" (subtitled "an essay in unitard theory") in the New Yorker which explores the absurdity of superhero costuming – a fuller realization of the "No capes!" rant by supersuit doyenne Edna Mode in The Incredibles.