SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

So let's talk for a moment about the portrayal of the characters. How do they compare to the book? Some are so dead-on they might have walked off the page - Dan "Nite Owl" Dreiberg, and Rorsach are absolute tops in this regard. It helps that their physical resemblence to characters first drawn twenty years ago is uncanny. But they're equally helped by having the lion's share of their subplots from the original story preserved. We see everything about Rorsach from his childhood flashbacks, to the grisly child-murder case that broke his mind and changed his view of good and evil, to his interaction with the prisoners when he's in jail, to his work as an investigator, to his interactions with all the other key characters. We even get the narration of his journal entries. In Dreiberg's case we see him interact with Hollis, the original Nite Owl. We see his morose and aimless civilian life. We see his embarrassed and restrained desire for Laurie emerge. We see him reclaim his heroic mantle and how he differs from Rorsach, even as they work together.

Less satisfying is the portrayal of Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk. In appearence she's a dead-ringer for the charcter she portrays. But in the film she's quite a bit more straightforward than the complex character of the original. She's not torn over her desire for Jon "Dr. Manhattan" Osterman while feeling trapped. She's basically over him the moment they're introduced, needing little more than an excuse to leap into Dreiberg's waiting arms. The awkward flirtation with Dreiberg is over and consumated in what seems like five minutes here, whereas it was intentionally a long and less-than-obvious match in the original story. Importantly, her complex love/hate relationship with her mother - the original Silk Spectre - is included here. This was a welcome surprise and did help add a bit more complexity to who she is and where her hostility comes from. The problem is this hostility is only sparingly allowed into the movie, changing Laurie from a recalcitrant heroine who resents that she ever played such a role, into just another retired hero. The script gives verbiage to the former, but it's simply not present in the performance.

The role of Dr. Manhattan is a bit harder to critique. It's a slightly different portrayal than in the original story. Both more abbreviated and just inherently harder to portray. How do you portray a character who sees every point in time at once, and frequently comments on the future and the past the way anyone else comments on the present? Someone who's frame of conscious skips readily across time in any direction? Apparently you make reference to it and then leave it out. Probably the right choice for the screen. The role tachyons play in allowing Veidt to launch his grand plan without Manhattan knowing is, in my opinion, never adequately explained. It's only from knowing the story that I knew what they were talking about in that regard, and I'm fairly sure most movie-goers will miss it entirely. However overall I think they got the essence of this character correct. He is "drifting" away from connection to humanity. And this is itself a major part of the plot.

Adrian Veidt is the last character I intend to mention. In some parts they got him right, and in others I think they got him very, very wrong. Where did they go wrong? They forgot that in the translation from the two-dimensional print medium that he's still supposed to have three dimensions on the screen. Veidt in this film is a villain, through and through. Missing are the complexities and dimensions of his character that make him more than that in the written story. Missing too is most of his back story. We know from the film only that he's called the smartest man in the world, though we're not sure if that's intended sarcastically. We know he's the richest man in the world. We know very little else other than that he is the one who decides to slaughter millions in order to bring about "world peace." Very little is done to complicate the thought process that lead him to this decision. Very little is done to obscure how he was able to bring this about in such secrecy. His portrayal even lacks the believable sympathy which makes it so difficult for the other heroes to conceive of as a villain in the original story.

Leaving characters aside there are a couple of jarring differences with the written story that deserve mention. Foremost among these is the nature of the attack unleashed by Veidt upon the world. In the book, this is portrayed as something Veidt stages as an alien invasion, complete with giant dead psychic-quid beasts appearing in the attacked cities. The film does away with this, instead having Veidt attack with a simulation of Dr. Manhattan's abilities, in effect framing him as the perpetrator. And you know what? I can leave aside my fanboy affinity for the original well enough to admit they got this one right. It is at once cleaner, more plausible, and motivating to what happens next. After this is makes great sense for Dr. Manhattan to leave Earth for good. It lends an understandable motivation to the superpowers to cooperate, in that they believe it was their near war that lead Manhattan to attack them both in the first place. It is, in short, an improvement to the original. And that's quite an accomplishment.

Another device that differs from the original is equally effective in the film adaptation. In lieu of being able to tell the back story of the "superhero" world in which the film is based in long narrative fashion, the movie opens with a series of sequential flashback images, starting back in the 40's and bringing us up to the present day. This brings a lot of context in areas that otherwise would never have fit into the film at all. It's not an improvement over the original, but it is a skillful adaptation of one medium to the other.

Jonah disagrees with an LA Times columnist who found Tom Zarek's execution of the Quorum. First, the LA Times guy:

As it became increasingly clear that Tom Zarek was the revolutionary voice behind the coup, we had to wonder if the past Gaeta, the smart guy doing all he could to help keep the ship's computer systems afloat, would revert back to the good guy who just wanted to help. That was severely tested when crazy Zarek decided to disband the quorum by killing them all. "Shoot them." What?! Where?! Huh?!

This was a misstep, meaning by the writers. Gasp! Yeah, I said it. Though Zarek has been shown to be a ruthless and power-hungry guy, he has not been shown to be an unconscionable murderer. There was always the sense that he really believed what he was doing was right, though under it all you knew he just wanted to be in charge. Or at least, that's how it seemed he was set up. When he killed his fellow representatives, he crossed the line from the people's man to the political butcher and doomed Gaeta in the process. Obviously, the "Battlestar" story crafters wanted a dramatic shift to occur during the coup, but it felt like a little more than just "doing what had to be done."

To which Jonah responds:

I couldn't disagree more. The brilliance of Zarek's night of the long knives was that he understood better than anyone what they were doing. He was the consummate revolutionary and former terrorist, who understood at every step that victory mattered more than anything else (note: as a moral matter, I think this is all nuts) because he day dreamed about power while pretending to be a democrat. What I like about the characters on BSG is that they are flawed, deeply flawed, sometimes idiotically flawed. The notion that Zarek wouldn't cross that line stems from a misguided belief that people with good intentions don't end up doing terrible evil.

To which I further respond...

Goldberg is right but doesn't explain it well enough. The LA Times guy is being naive in a particularly telling manner.

The Tom Zarek back story is one of the less appreciated subtle touches the writers put into BSG long ago. They gave us a pretty clear idea that Zarek was a demagogic revolutionary who was considered unquestionably dangerous by everyone who remembered him from the old days, before the Cylon attack. He was only released from prison because he effectively manipulated Lee Adama into advocating a compromise on his behalf during a crisis. Demagogues are very good at making others believe them like that. It's one of the things that makes them so dangerous.

One needs to ask oneself, in a show as dark as BSG should we really believe someone considered incredibly dangerous by the most consistent voices of authority on the show - Admiral Adama and President Roslin - would be incapable of cold-blooded murder in a moment of crisis? Particularly in the moment of a revolutionary coup?

I actually paused the show when Zarek ordered the murder of the Quorum to rave to my wife (and fellow BSG addict) about how realistic that was. It's a classic revolutionary tactic adopted by Marxist revolutions throughout the 20th Century. If you can't coopt the existing power structures, you eliminate them. The idea is you cannot allow the people any other option to turn to for leadership. Once it has begun, the alternative to a successful revolution is execution of the revolutionaries. Therefore anything opposing the revolution is "counter-revolutionary" and punished by death. This is done routinely by revolutionary "heroes."

For Tom Zarek substitute "Che Guevara" and you'll quickly see how it is not only possible but common for revolutionaries to become "political butchers" while maintaining their aura as high-minded idealists. Zarek has always been portrayed in a way consistent with Marxist revolutionaries, and the execution of the Quorum is just one more gritty reminder about what lies behind that kind of politics.

I suspect the LA Times guy found this plot turn implausible for the same reason he wouldn't find anything particularly offensive in someone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. When the dirty reality of revolution conflicts with the high-minded ideal, some consistently choose to believe in the latter and ignore the former.

UPDATE:

In response to some of the other supposed "implausibilties" within the plotline I found when reading the comments of that LA Times article...

Yes, it totally DID make sense that Adama and Tigh stayed with the ship rather than escape with President Roslin. That's modeled after real world naval command examples.

The commander of a naval ship who fled in the face of a mutiny would be disgraced. Personal honor is a very big deal in military culture, and the honor of a ship commander is very much tied to what happens to his ship. It would have been entirely out of character for a commander who has shown a sense of honor and bravery far above the norm to suddenly turn tail and flee without concern for his duty.

As for Tigh, he was also being very consistent with who he has been. If Adama left, he may well have gone with him. But once Adama decided to stay, not a chance. In the end Tigh has always been true to that friendship even when he's been at his worst. He's also been a salty s-b who would definitely take satisfaction in thinking he might be able to take a few mutineers out before he went down himself.

As for why Zarek deferred to Gaeta over key matters like allowing Adama to have a semblance of a trial, that's very simple. The military was following Gaeta, not Zarek. Zarek needed Gaeta far more than the other way around. It was only after Gaeta gained the compliance of his fellow mutineers that he went to Zarek. Without the support of Gaeta, Zarek wouldn't have had his revolution at all.