Like a lot people who grew up on comic books in the 1980s, I am looking forward to Watchmen movie with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.

In my heart I want to like it. If it does actually live up to the promise of the material in the way that the Lord of The Rings did that would be, well, awesome. But my head tells me to step back. It’s still just a super hero movie and, despite some recent successes, Hollywood has generally struggled to translate those brightly-colored panels to the screen.

I say this as a fan of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s creation, but not a die-hard one. I first read The Watchmen back in 1987 and found it brilliant — Rorschach is simply baddest urban vigilante of all-time — but also weighted down by its ponderous ambition. There was so much that Moore wanted to say that the art often seemed crowded out by the word ballons and narration. I was actually cheered when I learned that Zach Snyder would be the director.

Snyder is primarily a visual storyteller as well as a vulgarian, the two things I thought the original comic would need to work as a film. I could think of nothing worse than a epic-length movie about characters in funny suits standing around speaking page after page of Moore’s labyrinth exposition.

Snyder is reported to have stuck very close to Moore’s story while nevertheless adding the kind of blockbuster action set pieces seen in his earlier films Dawn of the Dead and 300. The advance word from critics is mixed, ranging from raves to pans and everything in-between. (In a very good sign for the film, Slate’s resident knucklehead Dana Stevens gave it the thumbs down.) I’ll find out for myself Friday night.

Certainly Moore’s works do not easily make the transition to the screen. The movie version of From Hell junked so much from the original I wondered why the studio bothered to buy it in the first place rather than create their own Jack the Ripper story.

V For Vendetta was one of the all-time worst movies I’ve ever seen, but since I have never read Moore’s original I have no idea whether the fault lies with the filmmakers or the source material.

The woeful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was nearly as bad a film and infinitely more depressing since it not only ruined a potentially classic adventure it also ensured that Sean Connery’s career ended on a bum note.

As Spike Jonze’s witty Adaptation pointed out, books have to be changed when they are taken to the screen because the two are fundamentally different ways of communicating.

My hope then is that Snyder was faithful to the source material without being overly reverent. The truth is the comic Watchmen is not a scared text any more than The Lord of the Rings was and thank God that Peter Jackson had the good sense to chuck the stuff that just wouldn’t work on the screen. I hope that Snyder had a similiar insight.