Previous efforts by Hollywood to make a film of ‘‘Watchmen’’ have failed. / DAVE GIBBONS/DC COMICS

A superhero movie with more philosophy than fight scenes.


By DAVE ITZKOFF BURBANK, California? When Zack Snyder became the director of the film adaptation of“Watchmen,”the graphic novel about troubled superheroes in a declining age, he knew that he was taking on not only a seminal piece of popular culture but more than 20 years of unfulfilled expectations and competing agendas.

From his encounters with the original comics, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, he was well versed in the creators’weighty, grown-up ideas about the futility of heroism and knew that they had no enthusiasm for seeing“Watchmen”turned into a movie. He was also aware that many directors before him had been unsuccessful at the same endeavor.

But Mr.Snyder said he believed that his greatest challenge would be satisfying the desires of the book’s devoted fans, who, like him, regard it as an exemplary work of postmodern storytelling and who would eviscerate him if he strayed too far from the original comics. And he believed that the only path to satisfying these viewers began by breaking from the source material.

“Watchmen,”which opens worldwide in early March, begins with a scene depicted only in fragments in the comics: a lengthy fight between an unknown assailant and an avenger called the Comedian. This is followed by an unhurried opening credit sequence, largely of Mr.Snyder’s invention, with a montage of masked do-gooders as they participate in key moments of atomicage history, like V-J Day and the assassination of John F.Kennedy.

The scenes that follow will be familiar to readers with a panel-bypanel familiarity with the comic: the surreal dream of a costumed vigilante who is plagued by sexual shortcomings and fears of nuclear war; a man-god created in a scientific accident, strolling the red sands of Mars; the city of New York partly annihilated by a villain’s master plan? all connected by a story about heroes who are corrupted by the darkness they cannot expunge from the world.

The two introductory scenes, Mr.Snyder said, are concessions to audiences who know nothing of“Watchmen,”“so that they will swallow the bitter pill of the next 20 minutes of the movie and listen to a bunch of superheroes rap it out for a while, before anything else happens.”

For more than two and a half years this has been the problem that Mr.Snyder has been asked to solve: how to preserve enough of the multilayered“Watchmen”graphic novel to satisfy its devotees, while providing entry points for a mass audience willing to sit through a $120 million, 160-minute, R-rated movie about contemplative crime fighters who rarely get into fights.

Almost from the moment that the first issue of“Watchmen”was published in America as a limited series by DC Comics in 1986, Hollywood has tried and failed to film it.

When Mr.Snyder, 42, was approached in 2006 to direct the film, his resume made many“Watchmen”fans nervous. A director of TV commercials, he was known for flashy and hyperkinetic work. In 2004 he had scored a hit with his remake of the George A. Romero zombie movie“Dawn of the Dead”and was at work on an unheralded action movie called“300,”a violent adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the ancient battle of Thermopylae, which went on to make $456 million worldwide.

“He’s got a very pop sensibility, which requires an incredible visual style,”said Jeff Robinov, the president of the Warner Brothers Pictures Group.

But Mr.Snyder, who first read“Watchmen”as a college student, knew that it was an arcane, intricate comic in which philosophy is exchanged more often than punches.

“There’s no moment where it’s not selfaware,”he said. Even as “Watchmen”adheres to superhero formulas, it is dismantling many traditions of the medium.

Mr.Snyder said he hopes the film might shift the balance of power between movie studios and comic-book creators. To this day, he said, Warner Brothers still wants Mr.Miller and him to create a sequel to “300.”

“The attitude toward comic books, they show their hand a little bit,”Mr.Snyder said.“They would never say that about a real novelist, but they would about a comic book.‘They just crank those out, right? It’s like no big deal.’”In the end, he said,“all I would hope is that this movie gives geek culture a little bit of cred.”