The problem, in the plainest terms, with Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen, is that it confuses fidelity to the source material with narrative propulsion. There are plenty of great books, or story ideas, that just don’t make compelling movies, and this is certainly an example of one. The film is a pretty, cool-looking rocket with an unlit fuse; it never gets off the ground. For those not primed to already give it a full-thrust embrace, does the surfeit of “cool” amount to anything more than just a decent time at the movies? Does it stick with you in any lasting fashion? Do you care about what has happened to the characters? No, I would submit that it doesn’t, and you don’t.

Uneven performances don’t help, but the film doesn’t create a convincing enough dystopian backdrop — either through sheer breadth, or perspicacious detail — to really sell the weight of its alleged doomsday drama, especially coming on the heels of something like last summer’s The Dark Knight. Even for kids who came of age at the end of the Cold War, in the Reagan era, the conflict of nuclear brinksmanship never loomed quite as large, front-and-center, as the new, present-day threats of international terrorism. The anxieties of the world today feel more diffuse and asymmetrical, so if you’re going to build your film around a superpower standoff — the type of conflict that would be the result of a massive, systemic conflict between two intractable nation-states — you’d better be prepared to do at least a bit of heavy lifting, story-wise. Watchmen does not; instead it gives us a couple digressive character backstories, and fritters away time on Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescuing some people from a burning building… yawn.