Zack Snyder's movie version of the DC Comics graphic novel Watchmen is a fantastically deranged epic; it might be making a bid for flawed-masterpiece status, except that it is probably more flaw than masterpiece. There are dull moments and moments of inspiration, moments of sublime CGI trickery and, repeatedly, moments when you suspect that a much-loved pop-rock standard is being bashed out on the soundtrack to make sure your interest levels don't flatline. It is a radioactive mosaic of bizarre touches and surreal tweaks: pop culture and newsreel history are audaciously morphed into a counter-factual landscape against which is played out the strange story of paranoid and vulnerable human beings who were once superheroes, but no more. Owing to public disillusion with unaccountable vigilantes, they have been forced to abandon their vocation - a postmodern twist also explored by the Pixar-Disney classic The Incredibles.
It is 1985, but not as you know it. Richard Nixon is still in charge, having passed a law allowing himself more than two terms; he is in any case wildly popular owing to the huge US victory in Vietnam. This is because the Americans had on their side awesome superhero Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a flaming-blue colossus with Blakean musculature and godlike powers to bend nature to his will. He is one of the Watchmen, the now disbanded crew of superheroes, including Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), Silk Specter 2 (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl 2 (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). The Watchmen are in fact the second-generation descendants of a prewar super crew called The Minutemen, with the original Silk Specter (Carla Gugino) and the original Nite Owl (Stephen McHattie).
The Watchmen are hardly straightforward good guys. They include someone truly despicable: the Comedian is a rapist, murderer and fascist stooge - a hitman for Tricky Dicky. He is shown as being the second gunman on the grassy knoll who assassinated Kennedy in 1963: this sequence is stunningly convincing. But disgusting as he is, the Comedian's depravities are to be surpassed by the mad hubris lurking within the disbanded Watchmen's ranks, the hubris that might destroy humanity itself.
There is something exhilarating in the sheer madness of Watchmen: a wacky world turned upside down - famous people from history are always getting dream-like cameos. Costumed combatants flit across the screen in the company of Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Pat Buchanan: the Watchmen's existence pokes some sharp satire at the besuited, capeless warriors of conservative America. The synapse-frazzling ambition of Watchmen is impressive as it lurches from hyperreal Earth to photoreal Mars; it is dizzy, crazy and quite sexy - when it's not being self-indulgent and pointless. If it doesn't quite hang together or add up, or stick faithfully to the comic-book original, these offences aren't major. What a spectacle.
