Watch It

The most acclaimed graphic novel of all time comes to the big screen.

by Sam Adams

MANHATTAN PROJECT: As Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen's only hero with legitimate power, Billy Crudup drains the humanity out of his character without turning him into an automaton.

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is the closest thing comic books have to a sacred text.

Simultaneously fulfilling and dismantling the imperatives of the costumed-hero genre, the 12-issue series is set in a world that was much like our own — at least until the heroes took over. Particularly with the appearance of Dr. Manhattan, a blue-skinned byproduct of nuclear research with the ability to manipulate matter at an atomic level, the world's history becomes radically divergent. The U.S. wins in Vietnam, Richard Nixon is elected to a third (and then fourth and fifth) term and Woodward and Bernstein are found dead before ever typing the word "Watergate." Rather than ushering in a utopia in which only the guilty have reason to fear, the appearance of caped crimefighters pushes the country toward authoritarian regime, and does nothing to slow the world's slide toward annihilation. Moore and Gibbons set out to follow the existence of anonymous vigilantes to its logical conclusion, and in so doing laid dynamite under half a century of superhero comics.

Director Zack Snyder approaches Watchmen on bended knee, replicating its camera angles and color scheme with the devotion of a true acolyte. Fans of the comic will find few nits to pick; the details have been carefully rendered, perhaps as much out of fear as fidelity. Snyder's Watchmen is faithful to a fault, so concerned with squeezing in favorite bits that it never finds its own shape.

David Hayter and Alex Tse's script makes a go of replicating the comic's intricate structure, which begins with the murder of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a cigar-chomping, red, white and blue boor who has been doing the government's dirty work for decades, and shifts through multiple narrators and time frames, flashing back to an earlier generation of heroes who thought they could save the world by punching out a handful of villains. The current Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) is actually the second of his kind, as is Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman), who picked up the mantle from her mother (Carla Gugino). But in recent years, the tide of public opinion has turned, sending most of the erstwhile heroes into anonymous retirement. The exceptions are Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), a foppish, eerily calm Brit who has parlayed his fame into a global financial empire, and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a sociopathic diehard whose personality is as unstable as the ever-flowing patterns on his black and white mask. Although Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is the only truly superhuman in the bunch, Snyder blurs the line by giving the rest speed and strength far beyond the gym could achieve.

Apart from amping up the violence and gore — not much of a surprise from the director of 300 — Snyder hews close to his source. But in staying true to the letter of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, he is false to its spirit. Where the comic was experimental, Snyder is slavish; where it led, he follows. Part of the movie's redundancy has to do with the genre that Watchmen helped spawn, a string of "dark" superhero tales that replaced childlike simplicity with adolescent angst (a tradition that neatly encompasses The Dark Knight). The mutually assured destruction that fuelled the comic's anxieties now seems like a museum piece, and Snyder's last-minute evocation of a rubble-strewn New York is not enough to yank the story into present-day relevance.

The movie's images have an ugly, overworked quality that comes from too much messing about in the digital realm, but there are a few noteworthy performances under the smear. Crudup manages to drain the humanity out of Dr. Manhattan's voice without turning him into an automaton, and Haley gives Rorschach intensity and depth the movie otherwise struggles to find. He is the movie's most repulsive character, but also its black and clotted heart, a place where dreams of a just world go to die.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Watchmen | Directed by Zack Snyder | A Warner Bros. release | Opens Friday at area theaters