Who will watch them?(Film)(Watchmen)(Movie review)

I'M not sure whether to be glad or sorry that I buckled down and read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, the mid-1980s graphic novel that looms over the genre like the Colossus over Rhodes, before I saw the movie. I'm glad because I went in with some sense of the baggage that the comic book's committed fans carried into Zack Snyder's big-screen version--and that Snyder himself doubtless carried into the work of adaptation. I'm also glad because having read the book guaranteed that I would understand roughly what the heck was going on. But I'm sorry because it robbed me of the chance to experience the film the way most of its audience will experience it: not as the much-anticipated adaptation of a beloved work of art, but as a would-be blockbuster aimed at the same kind of pop-cultural sweet spot as E.T., or Indiana Jones, or last summer's Dark Knight.

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My suspicion is that if you walked in with those expectations, you'd walk out mystified by what you'd just spent two hours and forty minutes sitting through. Most successful blockbusters trade on a single big "what if?" What if an alien landed in your backyard? What if the Nazis were after the Ark of the Covenant? What if a man dressed up as a bat to fight crime? Try to write the same one-liner for Watchmen, though, and you end up with something like this: What if the year were 1985, but in an alternative timeline that diverged from ours in the 1940s, when people starting dressing up in costumes to fight crime--and what if a fluke nuclear accident in the alternative-timeline 1959 created a genuine superman who contributed to an American victory in Vietnam, which in turn led to Richard Nixon's being reelected four times and a constantly escalating arms race--and what if by the time the Eighties rolled around New York were filled with semi-retired superheroes, all of them either depressed, impotent, megalomaniacal, or some combination thereof?

That's the load of bricks that Snyder's film drops on the unsuspecting moviegoer. Watchmen is set in an alternative version of an era that's 25 years gone, featuring superheroes you've never heard of (Ozymandias? Rorschach? The Nite Owl?) indulging in various kinds of R-rated conduct, with occasional cutaways to scenes of escalating nuclear brinkmanship between the U.S. and Soviet Russia and a finale that turns every superhero-movie convention on its head. "Welcome to a world without rules," The Dark Knight's tagline ran, but that film never really broke the mold. Underneath Heath Ledger's Nietzschean sermonizing was a fairly conventional superhero plot, larded with a little more suffering than usual but still following the basic comic-book rules. Watchmen, on the other hand, really does upend your expectations of what a superhero movie should be--with Tarantinoesque violence, full frontal nudity, and the kind of horrific mass murder that a more ...