Watchmen finds director Zack Snyder achieving a curious synthesis of his two previous films.

Like 300, this is an obsessively literal translation of a graphic novel, using the original panels as storyboards and pulling virtually all of the dialogue straight out of its word balloons. And like Dawn Of The Dead, it’s an adaptation of a ferociously beloved cult object that does justice to its source, even as it works some unavoidable changes on the material.

Against considerable odds, Snyder has brought the watershed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons to the big screen in a fashion that respects and even honours the text. (Moore’s name appears nowhere in the film’s credits, but that’s Moore’s doing, not Snyder’s.)

Set in an alternate 1985 where Nixon is still president and the Cold War is about to explode in Afghanistan, the story deconstructs American superhero mythology from the inside out, finding its masked heroes to be egomaniacs, fetishists, sociopaths and worse.

Once supported by the government, then forced into retirement by official fiat, a handful of former heroes are roused back into action when the murder of The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) leads the obsessive Rorschach (a guttural Jackie Earle Haley) to conclude that someone wants him and his colleagues dead.

The iconic Rorschach and Patrick Wilson’s noble but impotent Nite Owl do the bulk of the dramatic heavy lifting, with a digital Billy Crudup hovering above them as the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan, who takes time out from his own obsessions to confound paramour Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) with chilling glimpses of the future.

The script, by David Hayter and Alex Tse, retains the episodic nature of the graphic novel (originally published as a 12-issue comic series), shifting back and forth between the primary narrative and the origin stories of several characters.

Newbies may be hopelessly lost after the first 10 minutes, and fanboys may bristle at the tweaked ending, which doesn’t quite work as well as the filmmakers think it does. But given the scale and scope of the original graphic novel, this plays out as a solid translation of a thorny, complicated text.