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There are two ways you can go when filming a comic book movie these days: adaptation or recreation. For the big franchise heroes with an immense amount of history behind them, adaptation has worked well at re-introducing the movie-going public to iconic characters. You open yourself up to lots of bitching by comic fanboys when you condense or expand too much outside of accepted continuity, but directors like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) have done a fine job of re-introducing the classics to a new, and huge, audience.

Start recreating movies from stand-alone graphic novels — like 2007’s muscle-bound 300 — and directors are faced with both a simpler and more difficult path. In many cases, the dialogue can be pulled straight from word boxes and the scenes are already story-boarded by the original artist. All that’s left is making it look consistent with the original, and making tough choices about what to change.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a competent — if not inspired — recreation of Alan Moore’s seminal piece of superhero deconstruction. When problems do show up, it’s usually the result of Snyder’s choices outside of the source material.

Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985, deep into Nixon’s fourth term, the world on the brink of nuclear war between the non-heroic superpowers. The Watchmen are a group of outlawed superheroes with a grand history, now disbanded and working in the corporate world, living in retirement, or serving the government in nefarious ways. Most of them have no superpowers; just guys and gals in masks punching out criminals to clean the streets. When it comes to bigger challenges, like stopping World War III, impotence is the watchword.

Like the graphic novel, Watchmen tells much of the story of its heroes in flashbacks, covering the decades from their formation to their involvement in the war in Vietnam. The movie is so fraught with these — largely necessary — backtracks, that Snyder had to work out a way of framing them that would make sense to the viewers. He chose to go with an odd form of cultural re-mixing.

Cue the Vietnam scene: helicopters fly, superheroes kill, Marxists flee. Snyder overlays that with the most obvious choice of musical accompaniment possible: Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, straight outta Apocalypse Now. Elsewhere, flower children and protest groups groove to Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ and the disco era gets a KC and the Sunshine band track. At every stage, the music is so obvious that I suspect Snyder was working on a theory — perhaps something about recasting historical events within the confines of his movie. Unfortunately, the results comes across as ham-handed and distracting.

Despite the music, Watchmen looks great. Alternating easily between slick and gritty, the atmosphere never strives to do more than act as a perfect backdrop for the story. (This ain’t The Spirit.) Scenes and dialogue are comprehensively faithful to the original comic, the plot only veering off for a detour at the end. Even that change is faithful enough to barely raise eyebrows.

The cast is a refreshing melange of professional actors that can barely claim celebrity standing, the most well known being B-lister Billy Crudup. All the performers manage the comic book dialogue with aplomb, save an over-the-top caricature of Nixon and a wooden performance by Malin Akerman as the second Silk Spectre. But hey, at least the fanboys can drool over her breasts in IMAX.

The scene where Akerman’s performance is outshined by her physical assets is one of the longest, most graphic sex scenes in years. If Snyder had cut it in half we’d still get the idea without slowing the pace of the film, but the director obviously had trouble leaving anything on the cutting room floor. Watchmen clocks in at two hours 40 minutes, with a rumored DVD director’s cut that will blow past 3 hours. This is where being faithful to the source can hurt, since some scenes are so incongruous to the pace of the plot that it’s almost like taking a commercial break in the middle of the action. Maybe the Watchmen DVD should be the first to have a shorter director’s cut, with all the unnecessary and unimportant scenes taken out or reassembled.

But keep the dialogue. Keep the flowing, fun and sometimes horrifically gory fight scenes. Keep the seamless and surprisingly subdued visual effects. Keep Akerman’s breasts, too. Just give them less screen time. Ultimately, Watchmen is worth seeing despite Snyder’s heavy-handed choices, and easily competes with From Hell as the most effective adaptation of the work of Alan Moore yet on screen.

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