'Watchmen' is the comic book movie that came in from the cult

'THE WATCHMEN" is the only graphic novel to win a highfalutin literary award (a Hugo), because it had highfalutin ambitions.

Alan Moore's creation was a revisionist mind-bender, using the conventions of the comic book superhero as tools to deconstruct them, the way a modern historian might knee-cap Jefferson, or a critic might pick apart Tennyson.

Of course, it's one thing to go after a founding father or some dead white man of letters, another to pick on superheroes, who were purely creatures of myth, and the kind that can be purchased for 10 cents an issue and enjoyed with a chocolate shake.

Sure, Superman was said to represent the American Way, but mostly it was the American way of riding your bike to the store, buying a comic and surrendering to a delirious adolescent power fantasy.

For that reason, this attack by Moore and his Big Postmodern Brain on the tights-and-capes set has always struck me as slightly unfair, like hunting mice with a bazooka.

But a hunting he went, and the results changed comics forever, providing a template that's made them permanently darker and bloodier. His Watchmen weren't super - mostly stripped of magic - and they weren't heroes. Just flawed people with costumes, ruled by envy, ambition, lust, rage and self-pity.

Sound like fun?

Well, if anybody can find a way to bring a mass-market edge to this dark material, it's director Zach Snyder ("300"), who turned the battle of Thermopylae into an occasion to eat popcorn.

You'll find it much harder to maintain an appetite here (do not take kids, even younger teens, to this movie). This is the comic-book adaptation to see, if: you want to see one "superhero" sexually assault another, punching her brutally in the face not once but three times (I can think of better ways to use Carla Gugino); you want to see a caped crusader incinerate Vietnamese soldiers, or murder a pregnant woman; you want to see the remains of a molested child gnawed on by hungry dogs; you want an ultra-realistic re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination, exploding head and all.

The Kennedy assassination?

"The Watchmen" mythos turned superheroes into people, and U.S. politics into a cartoon. The Watchmen are a collection of costumed crime fighters first co-opted by the government (they help Nixon win a third term) then outlawed as the right wing consolidates power.

Most comply with government law, including Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Ozymandius (Matthew Goode), who now runs a conglomerate devoted to green energy, assisted by the one Watchman with true superpower - Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, blue and naked), who acquired his matter- and time-altering abilities in a laboratory accident. Why so blue? He's having romantic problems with ex-Watchman Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman). The one hold-out is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a violent vigilante who's always operated outside the law and sees no reason to stop now.

The complex plot kicks in when one of the Watchmen is murdered, leading Rorschach to investigate and conclude that somebody is stalking and killing the Watchmen, for reasons that have something do with Dr. Manhattan's premonition of an impending nuclear attack on New York City. (Snyder repeatedly uses the Twin Towers as a visual cue, as if the movie is on to something profound. Ugh.)

The course of his investigation delves into the backstories of the Watchmen, reveals their rivalries, insecurities and, in some cases, pathologies.

Snyder handles all of this lucidly and reverently; the vignettes propel the story, but they won't bring the uninitiated any closer to this dispiriting material.

It's said that Moore made the comic world safe for Frank Miller and his "Dark Knight," but last year's comic-book blockbuster is a rosy romp next to this one.

"Night" director Chris Nolan took care to bring Gothamites to life, in one key scene allowing ordinary people to choose compassion over fear.

The New York City of "The Watchmen" is a mass of faceless perps and victims. The Watchmen, we're constantly reminded, are merely people, and people in this movie are a mob that a true superman would be content to exterminate and abandon.

The movie concludes with one megalomaniac Watchman asking a more timid colleague what he's accomplished with his "schoolboy heroics."

Don't discount schoolboy heroics. They've entertained millions of schoolboys for generations.

A more pertinent question is what Snyder (Moore has disowned it in advance) has accomplished with this sour, soulless, $100 million "vision." *

Produced by Lloyd Levin and Deborah Snyder, directed by Zack Snyder, written by David Hayter and Alex Tse, music by Tyler Bates, distributed by Warner Bros.