Watchmen

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Last year, before a screening of "The Dark Knight," the expectant crowd sat waiting for smart-but-satisfying comic-book action. As the trailers unspooled, one stood out as a moody, bruise-blue series of violent and elegant images, costumed crime fighters smashing through the world (and each other) with eerie beauty. After the trailer for "Watchmen," the theater I sat in was silent, until one voice shouted out: "What the hell was that?"

"What the hell was that?" is just as valid after seeing the full "Watchmen" as it was after seeing the trailer, not as a curse or a note of dismissal but rather as a stopgap as you try to wrap your head around one of the most intellectually ambitious and yet viscerally satisfying films we've had in a long time. "Watchmen" makes for a bizarrely bleak blockbuster, as director Zack Snyder ("300") turns writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons' rich, revisionist, justly praised, 12-part 1986 comic book into nothing less than an attempt to decode 20th century America through its pop culture and vice-versa.

"Watchmen" is set in a parallel 1985 in which Richard Nixon is still president, the Cold War is on the edge of boiling over, and a handful of people once dressed up in costume to fight crime (and one has powers so incomprehensible he's not even human anymore). "Watchmen" tries to do (and in many cases does) with comic-book movies what "The Godfather" did with gangster movies and "The Searchers" did with Westerns: Take a silly, very American genre and flip it to say serious things about America. Most comic-book movies (and comic books) are adolescent power fantasies; "Watchmen" is about the grown-up realities of power, and about the thin line between fantasy and nightmare.

The film begins with the murder of one of the old-school "masks," a heartless thug ironically called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who went from back-alley scuffles in the '30s to black-bag government work after most of the heroes were outlawed in the mid-'70s. Demented detective Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, chilling and brutally effective despite mostly wearing a shape-shifting, psychedelic inkblot-styled mask) looks into the killing, warning and investigating his old comrades: Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the all-too-human "smartest man alive"; Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), a beautiful woman in an ugly business; Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson, sympathetic and slumped), a drab, impotent depressive who used to stalk the streets with an arsenal of techno-toys; and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, disembodied and detached), whose superhuman ability to manipulate matter has pushed him further and further from his own humanity.

But "Watchmen" isn't about a murder any more than "The Godfather" is about the management of a family business; Snyder and screenwriters Alex Tse and David Hayter have turned Moore and Gibbons' moody masterwork into a sprawling, slithering film that stays with you in unexpected ways. Yes, you can feel where it's compressed to fit on the screen: the civilians who served as the Greek chorus in the original comic are shoved aside here in the name of expediency; and the finale feels too rushed to truly sink in as the film skims over the murderous monstrosity of a plan that began with a single killing.

But you have to appreciate the craft and labor that went into the visual splendor (both the physical sets and costumes and the computer-generated wonders), and also appreciate Snyder's refusal to look away from the irrational rationality that made the original so good. There's graphic sex and violence and fury here (not to mention a very naked, glowing, blue computer-generated superhuman), all of it curiously more real than in many mainstream dramas, and it makes you reconsider every comic-book film you've unthinkingly enjoyed. When Rorschach is imprisoned and lashes out at the criminals around him -- "You don't understand: I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me!" -- the crowd laughed the deep, grunting laughter of people shocked by the pale, sick underbelly of every biff-bang-pow crime-fighting fantasy.

"Watchmen" takes familiar old concepts and slaps fierce new life into them, making you question where they came from even as you appreciate them in action, not ripping off our pop culture's past so much as reimagining, revising and remixing it. The film will please most of the longtime fans who have loved this story's dark heart for more than two decades. But some devoted purists will grumble (Moore himself has had his name removed from the film) at the changes and compressions. And those who don't know the source material will either fail to get how the violence and sex are self-contained cultural critique on the flaws and failings of comic books, or will be willingly pulled into the dense, ironic vision of a work of fiction that riffs on everything from Plato to "Apocalypse Now," from "The McLaughlin Group" to the Zapruder film. Snyder's 25-minute-longer director's cut (which will be in theaters in June) will probably feel less rushed and make for more complete viewing, but right now, even at 2 hours and 41 minutes, "Watchmen" still lands with a fast, mean gut-punch intensity, turning decades of bright-colored action and excitement into a funhouse mirror to make us reflect on the real 20th century's shades of gray.

James Rocchi's writings on film have appeared at Cinematical.com, Netflix.com, SFGate.com and in Mother Jones magazine. He lives in Los Angeles, where every ending is a twist ending.