By Carl Hoover

Tribune-Herald entertainment editor

The rhetorical question “Who watches the watchmen?” runs through Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark 1986 comic series Watchmen, scrawled on urban walls in the backgrounds of comic panels.

The question “Who will watch Watchmen?” has an answer that’s pretty clear after the movie adaptation’s two-hour, 43-minute running time: Watchmen fans who know something about the story before entering the theater.

Director Zack Snyder (300) pulls off a major accomplishment in bringing the dense, dark superhero story to the big screen without losing the graphic novel’s tone, striking visual sense or philosophical musings. The rub? Those who view Watchmen cold, assuming it to be just another superhero action flick, may find themselves confused, bored or itching to leave.

The story is set in an alternative 1985. Richard Nixon is still president, having employed superheroes, including the blue-skinned Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), with his ability to manipulate space and time, and thuggish The Comedian/Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to end the Vietnam War. The Keene Act has sent masked superheroes like Night Owl II/Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), The Comedian, Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) and Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) — second-generation members of a group called the Minutemen — into retirement though Rorschach/Walter Kovacs (Jackie Earle Haley), his mask an ever-shifting pattern of inky blots, continues in the shadows.

America and the Soviet Union are sliding closer to nuclear war, Dr. Manhattan’s existence in a quantum world is straining his human connections — including his relationship with Laurie Jupiter — and someone is starting to murder the Minutemen, with the Comedian’s violent death the trigger that spurs Rorshach into finding the killer.

Those plotlines drive the drama to locations as exotic as Mars and Antarctica, but what created many Watchmen fans in the decades since its 1986 release were the meatier, hypothetical and sometimes metaphysical questions Moore and Gibbons raised. What’s it like in a world where superheros can alter reality and history? Is mankind irredeemably violent, greedy and selfish, as The Comedian and Rorschach believe? Is it worth saving, which Dr. Manhattan ponders?

Snyder’s film, with screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, retains most of that, though what works on the comics page often creaks in translation to the screen.

Characters’ internal musings, such as Rorschach’s private journal, come off as pseudo-philosophical blather when heard in gruff, gravelly narration that recalls Clint Eastwood. The series’ episodic development of each character’s backstory works against the film’s narrative momentum with flashbacks and side stories putting main plotlines on hold.

Watchmen’s superheroes broke with convention with their human problems — anger, sadism, jealousy, neurosis, impotence, paranoia, megalomania, emotional alienation — yet the film leans on standard superhero conventions such as elaborate fight scenes, gory and bone-snapping violence and sexy female characters for much of its energy.

And, yes, Watchmen merits its adult R rating, with its brutal, graphic violence, its sex (Nite Owl and Silk Spectre get it on twice, with Spectre wearing one of the hottest, tightest superwoman outfits since Michele Pfeifer put on her Catwoman outfit) and nudity (Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan in full frontal bluity).

Of course, that grown-up material could be a major reason behind the movie’s considerable fanboy buzz: Those avid young readers of the 1980s now are on the falling cusp of 30.

The movie’s not a letter-perfect copy of the book. The prose fake book excerpts, stories and journal accounts sandwiched between the graphical action of the issues are squeezed out as are sideplots about the corner newstand and its regulars and a pirate comic book series. Most notably, the surrealistic finale of the book gets altered to another plot device which has roughly the same outcome.

Snyder and his production crew capture much of the book’s rich visual sense, from the Martian landscape where Dr. Manhattan mulls the fate of humanity to grimy city streets and alleys where the Minutemen work and live, from the Nite Owl’s high tech flying machine Archimedes to Ozymandias’ sleek, emotionally cold secret lair.

The attention to detail, however, doesn’t extend to the makeup as historical characters and celebrities Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ted Koppel, Dick Cavett, Pat Buchanan and others look jarringly fake.

Seventies’ and eighties’ pop culture references are scattered throughout — floppy computer disks, the 1984 Macintosh television commercial, a Vietnam War scene referencing Apocalypse Now — while the film’s musical mix is all over the map, from Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to 99 Luftballoons and Leonard Cohen.

Flawed as its superheroes yet dense and ambitious, Watchmen likely will entertain forgiving fans. Non-fans, though, may prefer watching a film from a universe they recognize.

choover@wacotrib.com

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