“Watchmen” is both remarkably ambitious and also not quite ambitious enough. It’s so true to the graphic novel it’s breathtaking (except for the finale.) But in the end, for all its efforts, it can’t quite shake its somewhat silly comic book roots.

For the uninitiated, the Watchmen are a band of superheroes who’ve been forced by law to hang up their costumes. They have a harder time hanging up their ambitions.

When one of their band is murdered, a paranoia sets in among many of the Watchmen as they try to decide if and how they should track down the killer.

That’s the bare bones of the story, but the movie, like the book, is so much more than its simple narrative.

The book couldn’t be more ambitious formally. Its panels often have multiple threads going on simultaneously – song lyrics jostle with character dialogue alongside passages from an entirely unrelated shipwreck story…all inside the same panel!

Combine that with the multiple characters’ storylines and the constant time jumps and you have a comic book chockful of visual complexities.

And it’s stunning how close the film cleaves to the book, especially to its look. The movie exactly mimics many of the Watchmen panels. And they’re tricky visuals – vertigo-inducing high angle shots from atop a skyscraper to a vista across the planet Mars; even a giant see-through blue man. The mimicry is spot on.

“Watchmen” is also very rich thematically. Like many of the better comicbook heroes, the Watchmen characters have human foibles in spades. The Nite Owl apparently can’t even get it up if he’s not in costume and the Silk Sceptre has issues with her lover Dr Manhattan being able to multi-task while making whoopee.

But whereas, say Spiderman or the X-Men may struggle with personal issues, many of the Watchmen are not only flawed but deeply flawed. Ozymandias is a megalomaniac, Rorschach a raving sociopath, and the
Comedian a right-wing zealot. With “heroes” like these who needs enemies?

This is all part of the thematic underpinnings of the Watchmen universe where heroes are as much a part of the problem as they are a solution. Its ultimate ethical or philosophical question is: how do you weigh a life’s worth, in the grand scheme of things? If you can save millions of lives by sacrificing thousands, is it right to do so?

This is all pretty heavy stuff for a comic book, er excuse me, graphic novel. And that for me is finally the problem with both Watchmen the book and movie.

As much as I applaud its formal experimentation and its rich thematic play, I just don’t think the comicbook format is sturdy enough to sustain its ambitions. And it’s not just because we have grown-ups wearing some pretty ridiculous costumes, although I admit that is something of an impediment. Mostly, it’s because the restrictions of the panel format can’t sustain long conversations, and when you’re trying to present
indepth personal psychologies or raise knotty moral issues, long conversations are almost mandatory.

In the end, WATCHMEN is like Plato on Twitter.