How you react to this adrenaline-surging action fantasy depends on whether you enjoy graphic novel adaptations. This one has superheroes, realistic violence and an over-complex storyline whose comprehensibility relies on pre-existing knowledge of Alan Moore's (uncredited) cult graphic novel on which director Zack Snyder's film is based.
But while you may experience real problems trying to follow the multi-layered storyline, Watchmen scores very highly indeed on visual and visceral terms.
The setting is an alternative 1985 New York, where Richard Nixon is still in office, a doomsday clock ticks off the minutes to nuclear war with the USSR and crime-fighting superheroes are endemic despite being banned by law. The murder of one of them, Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), prompts masked vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to reunite his fellow crimefighters, only one of whom, Billy Crudup's atomic scientist transformed by a laboratory accident into a shape-shifting blue demigod, actually possesses supernatural powers. Stunningly staged action and spectacular special effects are the name of the game here, and Snyder's driving direction does help to compensate for the narrative incoherence.