Zach Snyder’s “Watchmen” begins with the defusing of a bomb. Not a literal bomb, mind, rather a figurative grenade filled with acid fan-boy disapproval of this remake of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ revered graphic novel Watchmen, an entry on Time magazine’s list of the best novels of the last century. Synder disarms his detractors in the movie’s first two sequences. First is a scene, faithful to the book, in which a mysterious killer bumps off a hero named The Comedian. Second are the opening credits, humorous tableaux starring more heroes from the Watchmen universe set to Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. As several decades of U.S. history go by, cheekily revised—The Comedian is in Dealey Plaza, Dr. Manhattan greets Armstrong on the moon—Snyder lets the fans know he’s revising Watchmen, too, with wit and style to spare. It’s not Moore’s tale, we understand, but it’s going to be done in the style of a very sophisticated comic book.

Indeed, of the many elements of Moore’s book that Snyder successfully brings to the big screen, the best is simply his ability to load his scenes with the sort of marginal objects that tickle the fancy of comic book readers. The whiz-bang special effects, dynamic framing, and hyperkinetic action native to comic book movie adaptations are all here, but they are upstaged by Snyder’s unerring eye for amusing details and funny visual quotations: Nike’s famous “1984” shoe ad on a TV, scraps of newspaper headlines floating in the wind, framed photos of fictional heroes with real historical figures, the barely-audible hectoring of a whore, Nena’s “99 Luftballons”, a “McLaughlin Group” for the ages, a copy of Hustler on The Comedian’s coffee table, a Pentagon war-room shot like “Dr. Strangelove” and a Vietnam rice paddy shot like “Apocalypse Now”, the myriad products manufactured by Veidt Industries, and many more. Snyder has made a name as a director of slick action films like “Dawn Of The Dead” and “300”, but in “Watchmen” he has paid more attention to re-creating a full comic book world. Though it deviates often from the world invented by Gibbons and Moore, nowhere does it lack the book’s sense of place and abundance of things; Watchmen at its best is a colorful, wordy, glorious clutter, and so is Snyder’s film.

True, Snyder lionizes the characters at an ironic distance and fetishizes the violence that Moore intended to deconstruct. For instance, Silk Spectre II cracks a self-deprecating joke about wearing a latex suit, but when she paints it on for some ass-kicking, Snyder’s camera caresses every one of Malin Akerman’s curves, relishes every kick and chop of her Xena-fied body. “Watchmen” has been called the first comic book arthouse film, and such praise is fair—if ‘arthouse film’ can be taken as praise—only if the hiccups in tone are ignored. Snyder can’t resist turning isolated pockets of “Watchmen”, otherwise so lovingly constructed, into ’roided-up heavy metal videos, such as the scene in which Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) break into a prison to spring their comrade Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley). Eveything’s set up so nicely, and then a “badass” up-tempo jam rocks the soundtrack and the film goes slo-mo, almost “Matrix”-style. In such moments it’s questionable how in command of his source material Snyder really is. Moore splashed violence across the pages of his book to confront horror as horror, not as a pretext to expand the horizon of grotesque imagery in movies, e.g. arms being sawn off and jagged broken bones shooting up through human skin.

The film is carried by fine performances by two of its key Watchmen, Haley’s sociopathic Rorschach and Billy Crudup’s otherworldly stoic Dr. Manhattan. There’s an amusing contrast between them. Haley’s performance is maximal, Crudup’s minimal; Haley’s job is to invoke Robert De Niro’s snarling taxi driver without seeming like an impersonation or a parody; Crudup merely had to give dignity to a glowing blue man with a penchant for walking around in the nude, physics dangling. If Haley had been one iota less intense than he was, Rorschach would have flopped. If Crudup had been one iota more intense, his Dr. Manhattan would have been a risible cartoon.

The relationship between Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan is really the heart of the film. That they both got it right is the reason “Watchmen” is as good as it is. They represent the two poles of human potential: Rorschach is the broken, twisted, maimed, squalid man, while in the other direction Dr. Manhattan is a living Da Vinci sketch, a godlike example of the perfectibility of man. What the story shakes out of these men, each inhuman in his own way, are the last and best scraps of humanity left when everything fictitious is stripped away. To the bitter end Rorschach remains loyal to the truth, Dr. Manhattan to the sanctity of life. “Watchmen” simply couldn’t have worked without compelling and believable performances from Haley and Crudup.

The two heroes in “Watchmen” allegorize the endless battle within the human mind between our uncompromising pursuit of truth and the inability to live with what we find. Truth triumphs; the man who witnesses, not the man who acts like a superhero—a mere diary-keeper—turns out to be the hero. For all the film’s faults, largely having to do with Snyder’s crypto-fascist obsession with violence, “Watchmen” brilliantly keeps this clash in view. It cannot replace the original graphic novel, but it carries Moore’s central message in a form both entertaining and thought-provoking. Don’t tell Moore, but Snyder smuggled something of his own into the mix, too: “Watchmen” is funnier and more playful than the graphic novel, perhaps the final triumph of the Comedian’s sick spirit.