Moore's opus fails on big screen

"Watchmen" seems to be trying to convince its audience they ought to care about its plot and characters because the Cold War happened, dammit, and as a nation on the receiving end of comic book mythology they should appreciate that fact. But any movie that opens with Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin," accompanies a sex scene mid-way through with Leonard Cohen's version of "Hallelujah" and closes with the My Chemical Romance cover of "Desolation Row" has a lot more explaining to do than simply pointing to paranoia of nuclear war.

Those who have read the "Watchmen" comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will probably like its movie iteration just a little bit more than those who haven't, if only because the movie will then be at least slightly intelligible. Zack Snyder, director of such illustrious remakes as "300" and "Dawn of the Dead" (2004), fails predictably in his attempt to pack 12 issues of comic book into two and a half hours of screen time. At no point during the movie is the audience told who the characters are, or why what they are doing should matter to us.

The movie does communicate the vague feeling that, had the viewer grown up in the 1970s as an avid comic book reader, they might be a little more engaged by the movie's plot and characters. Nixon is still president in the movie's version of 1985. Some of the superheroes help win the Vietnam War. Their costumes vaguely recall aspects of early Captain America, pre-Loeb and Sale Batman, Spider-Man, Nick Fury, Superman, Captain Marvel and many other comic book heroes in their earliest iterations. The movie never describes, however, exactly what superpowers any character is supposed to have, or, as follows, what each particular character's mythos means to the audience.

Many of the film's problems are typical of comic book adaptations-poor characterization, confusing flashbacks and scene switches, bad costuming and muddled attempts to "update" the original comic. Snyder's "300" was more laughable than the bad Frank Miller comic, and his "Dawn of the Dead" remake commercialized a film that was built around a critique of commercialization. Other directors have similarly failed: "Spider-Man 3" was a wash. "Constantine" made the mistake of casting Keanu Reeves. "Blade" abandoned the specifics of its comic's vampire mythos. "Daredevil" was completely unremarkable (like most of Affleck's acting career). "The Fantastic Four" was sexy but not much else. "Ghost Rider" featured a skyscraper as its most interesting villain. The list is a long one. Yet despite its punctuality in falling victim to all the banal trappings of crappy Hollywood films, "Watchmen" still managed to maintain delusions of grandeur.

Get this: The film tries to reference its cinematic history in the same way that the comic references its graphic novel history. Jack Snyder is suddenly an art historian! Explicit visual references to "Dr. Strangelove," "Apocalypse Now," "Metropolis" and other political satires indicate Snyder believes he has a place alongside Kubrick and Coppola in the ranks of great political filmmakers. The audacity.

Alan Moore himself called it.

"You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, 'Watchmen' is very cinematic,'" Moore told "Variety" magazine, "when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic."

He also predicted the fundamental problem with film remakes of comic books.

"With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there," Moore said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."

Any writer creating an alternate reality automatically assumes a kind of "burden of proof," whereby the alternate reality must be made to matter to an audience, whether by clear analogy or sympathetic characters. This is a shorter way of saying that a set of newly created superheroes, such as the ones in "Watchmen," who run around in a fictitious 1985 stealing each others' girlfriends, going to Mars for no apparent reason and killing midgets and commies, assume the "burden of not confusing and boring the hell out of everyone." Maybe Snyder did it for the laughs.