Watchmen / Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which Time Magazine named as one of the 100 best English language novels (not graphic novel, for which it was also named—but novel, taking a place alongside Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison, George Orwell and John Steinbeck), has been in production limbo in Hollywood since it was first commissioned in 1986. The closest attempt to an adaptation came in 1991 with Terry Gilliam attached to direct. Gilliam, no stranger to troubled productions, bowed out after failing to raise enough funds, but also noted that the storyline, originally appearing in 12 monthly installments in comic book form, was unfilmable.

“The problem with Watchmen,” Gilliam told Empire magazine in 2000, “is that it requires about five hours to tell the story properly, and by reducing it to a two or two-and-a-half hour film, it seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about.

Director Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead, 300) bumped the film’s length time to two hours and 43 minutes, and the biggest surprise is that fans of the novel won’t be demanding his head on the stick. Snyder, except for a slight tweaking of the ending (which actually works better than the novel) and an insertion of environmental resources to make the film more culturally relevant to the present—despite taking place in a re-imagined 1980s America—manages an almost slavish recreation of the film. Many scenes cut from the film still get their homage, and they are done with a certain amount of cleverness, unlike uber-comic fanboy director Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil, Ghost Rider) who references with all the subtly of a sledgehammer.

Set in a 1985 in which the United States won the Vietnam War, Nixon is elected for a third term and America and Russia are poised at the brink of nuclear destruction, Watchmen begins with the murder of The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former government shill. Costumed heroes, once revered, are now considered vigilantes and declared illegal. But one person, calling himself Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), stays in character, and surmises that someone is targeting “Masks.”

For those who haven’t read Moore’s magnum opus, those whose only introduction is through commercials and previews promising stylized fight scenes and shiny costumes, Watchmen will be a surprise. Instead, the story involves Nietzschean philosophy and moral ambiguity—a bleak allegory of fascism and the Cold War. These are scenarios that can’t be put forward with fist fights, and so the characters ruminate on their ideals and experiences at great length, to the point that it becomes less of a comic book film and more of a David Mamet play, particularly with Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, stripped of clothes and adorned in blue light), who leaves Earth for solitude on Mars to contemplate his meaning in the universe. With all this self-reflection, the action sequences, sparse but done with flair to sate the action-hungry, are both welcome and yet almost unnecessary.

The rest of the story is ponderous, almost to point of pretentiousness. Moral ambiguities run throughout the cast of characters with the exception of Rorschach, who doggedly tries to warn his former cohorts while investigating the scene. He’s the main focus of Moore’s work, and it’s a huge sigh of relief to see that Haley gets it right, being both pitiful and dangerous, a right-wing sociopath who only sees the world in black and white absolutes.

Moore has disavowed the film version, publicly stating he has placed a curse on the production and receives no author credit. It’s fitting, because where this film falters is when the director makes his own decisions, such as a ludicrous extended sex scene (which he also did with 300—if Hollywood abandons him, Snyder can have a lucrative career in softcore porn). In addition, the musical choices are painfully obvious and distracting, from Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” to Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Not since Forrest Gump has music so unnecessarily dominated the script to advance the story. As a whole, however, the film is better than it deserves, and that is because of the source material and Snyder’s near fanaticism in honoring it.

A warning for those expecting family-friendly superhero fare in the style of Iron Man: Watchmen is fully deserving of its R-rating, featuring brutally graphic murders, rape, child endangerment, profanity and full frontal nudity. If ever the statement that comic books are not just for kids anymore rang true, it shows with this dark, and thoroughly adult film.

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