Film

A dead-serious funny book that turned superhero mythology on its masked head, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen deconstructed superheroes with rigorous psychological realism: Meet the modern caped crusader, one who’s sociopathic, sexually dysfunctional and a fascistic government stooge. Snyder’s claustrophobically faithful adaptation proves that trying to bring such a philosophically dense work to the screen is a losing proposition at best. The plastic-fantastic Pop Art downer he’s produced, however, is as close as we are apt to get.

The movie starts off with a bang—or rather, several kapows and a thud. A beefy man (Morgan) once known as the Comedian tussles with a stranger; the rumble ends with the series’s iconic image of a smiley face splattered with blood and the former hero being tossed out of his penthouse window. What follows is a credits sequence, audaciously set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” that interweaves the film’s messed-up masked avengers into a 20th-century historical mix-tape: Alfred Eisenstaedt’s legendary Times Square–smooch photo, President Kennedy’s assassination, Kent State.

It’s one of the few times the self-proclaimed “visionary” (!) director gets creative with the material. Fearful of any reaction from a rabid fan base, Snyder treats the comic as a storyboard; such scrupulousness should keep the Watch geeks happy, though it quickly becomes asphyxiating. But more importantly, the film also retains the book’s commitment to seriously digging deep into the psychic debris of these archetypes. If nothing else, Snyder has moved the superhero-movie genre one step closer to maturity.