Made for the huge audience of techno nerds that, familiar with the material, invaded this theatre - along with one couple who drugged their less than two-year-old kid with orange juice to keep her quiet). I'm told it is faithfully based on the 12-issue comic book, later made into a highly successful novel. The film version, in an attempt to include as much of the material as possible, crammed it in short-hand style into wham-bam action and zippy cutting, the results of which so aroused the ire of Alan Moore (who, with Dave Gibbons wrote the book) that he disavowed the adaptation.

Without having taken the time to read the massive tome, I found myself lost for the first expositional half hour. Gradually, I recognized a pattern of sorts: seems until 1985 (with Richard Nixon now in his 5th term as president), cities were protected by "watchmen," created to protect us with their diverse powers - much as it might have been if Superman, Spiderman, et al, operated simultaneously around the country, each within its own regional boundaries - God only knows how things operated around the rest of the globe. No matter. This is comic book material, right?

Well, as the movie progresses, we are treated to flashbacks revealing some whys and wherefores about the watchpeople (one's female, with her daughter taking over as she ages); that are introduced to fill in the blanks, but because the material is crammed in short-hand style, it actually confuses more than helps. What does become somewhat clear is that one of the group - Rorschach, a paranoid fellow with face concealed behind a cloth mask covered with ever-changing Rorschach-like shapes - comes to the conclusion that the watchers, no longer needed, are in danger of being stamped out, but by whom, and why, and how? The extant watchers, now busy with their own private lives and loves, pay little attention to Rorshach's warning, untilŠ

That's when things get really complicated. Suffice to say, wild, super-natural things happen, here and in the universe. Added to the mix is a secondary plot: our government is now involved in a "Dr. Strangelove" kind of international situation and may need help to avert global destruction.

The action is comic book wild and ongoing, with the "bams" and "pows" replaced by graphically brutal mayhem that include beyond the use of fists a whole series of interesting devices, like flame throwers, body mutilation, vicious animals, evisceration, and a variety of knives and hatchets, always with hyped-up sound and blood spraying in all directions. (The little girl abandoned her orange juice fix and sat wide-eyed in her mother's lap as she watched a hatchet repeated slam into a thug's head, but began crying during a particularly graphic sex scene. One way to educate to the young?)

The effects were spectacular: director Zack Snyder let all stops out for speed and ultra-super-comic book bigger-than-life storytelling; screen writers David Hayter and Alex Tse created a tight-knit script that included profundity like, "The existence of life has been highly overrated," to the banal, after a particularly violent battle, "It's kinda heavy, y'know?" while composer Tyler Bates threw in everything from Nat King Cole, Paul Simon and Bob Dillon to Mozart and Philip Glass to back up the wide-screen, awesome effects. If not comprehensible, at least the movie was big on atmosphere - the 163-minutes were far from dull.

A question remained, even after some enthusiastic nerds tried to explain to me what it was all about - should a film with a budget that matches our national debt be made to satisfy only those who have done their book-reading homework first? We didn't need to read "Gone With the Wind" or any other epic-making film for full appreciation. I know Snyder faced the issue head on, but even with his compromises, it didn't work.