These varied vigilantes bicker, bully, rehash the (mostly woeful) past, and, by fits, re-inspire one another to action. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a former physicist whom a nuclear accident rendered blue, bald, and (frequently) butt-naked. No one much bothers over the death of The Comedian, except for Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a fellow vigilante and borderline sociopath who worries it may be the work of a "mask-killer" and sets himself the twin tasks of solving the crime and warning other former heroes of the threat: nice guy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), vinyl vixen Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), corporate titan Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), and the omnipotent Dr. It's a nice sequence, although, in contrast to the sly appropriation of "Unforgettable," it's set ham-fistedly to "The Times They Are A'Changin." (From here on out, the film rarely misses a chance to have a musical cue tell us something we already know: "The Sounds of Silence" accompanies a funeral procession, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" plays as one character wrangles with the captains of global industry, "Flight of the Valkyries"-!-blares during a Vietnam battle scene.) (With one notable exception, Moore's "heroes" are not super-powered.) To get us up to speed, Snyder offers a historical montage on the evolution of costumed crusaders from the 1940s on, the early glories and tragic endings: a Mothman who went cuckoo, a lesbian avenger murdered with her lover, the eventual outlawing of the mask-and-tights set. We soon learn that before his terminal fall Blake was a former crime-fighter named The Comedian, who'd more recently worked as a kind of paramilitary thug for the U.S. As a perfume ad set to Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" comes on, a mysterious figure bursts in and begins taking Blake apart, hurling him into walls and furniture and, finally, through his wide plate glass window. It's 1985, and Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), aging but still athlete-fit, watches television in his luxurious New York apartment. Snyder's film opens sharply, tweaking the sequence of Moore's original. Watchmen is in some ways an impressive movie, but it is a drearily over-literal one, the sober, well-financed retelling of a hallucinatory fever dream. Opinions will vary on whether self-announced "visionary" director Zack Snyder's $100 million-plus adaptation is proof or refutation of this belief, though count me among those who judge it the former. It's not without reason that Watchmen was long believed to be unfilmable. Dickian comic-within-a-comic read by a peripheral character, the lengthy excerpts from (fictional) autobiographies and journal articles scattered throughout. The audacity of Moore's grim story of costumed heroes plagued by psychosis and alcoholism and lust, teetering on the brink between justice-seeking and sadism, was exceeded only by the style and imagination with which he (and illustrator Dave Gibbons) told it: the meticulous, nine-panel format that lent structure to the madness, the Philip K. I first read Alan Moore's seminal comic Watchmen when it was published in graphic-novel form in 1987, and it was a minor revelation.
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