Physics was pretty helpful. It didn't help that my primary teacher was a shell of a man, who's wife had left him a few years earlier after he was on the edge of life due to a cancer scare and decades of teaching, and his TA was a bitch who thought we were the best of friends because we both liked the Rev. That, and I for some reason really hate practical sciences. Geometry is a close second.
I'm not sure that the Watchmen movie "deserves" anything. I haven't seen it yet (going to a midnight showing tonight), but it the film is genuinely hard to follow on its own merits, then it has narrative problems. No, it was never going to be a 1-to-1 remake of the graphic novel (due to time constraints alone), but that is the hard work of the adapter: to pull out the aspects of the story they deem important and create a competent narrative that stands on its own.
This goes both ways, of course; even if the film leaves out aspects of the story I feel are integral to the plot as a long time Watchmen fan, as long as the movie has an internal consistency, I don't think it has necessarily failed me, either as a fan or as a viewer. The movie needs to stand on its own. And more to the point, journalists don't need to respect where Watchmen is pulling its source material from to make a judgment on the film itself; if I made a movie that was about space chimps shooting poo-and-banana rockets at each other in the deepest regions of the dark void, I would hope that I wouldn't get a free pass just because I called it MacBeth.
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