Zack Snyder's "Watchmen" is the second comic book film in a year (the other being "The Dark Knight") that has the courage to ask difficult questions and not dole out easy answers. Based on Alan Moore's much beloved graphic novel, "Watchmen" ensures that the material will gain mainstream recognition, and possibly, adoration.

Disclosure: I have read the graphic novel, and consider it the best comic that I've ever picked up. It's a certainty that readers of the graphic novel, like myself, will have a different experience with "Watchmen" than newcomers will. The fairly dense storyline is streamlined in a way that has enraged some of the familiar with the material while delighting other fans. But what will most audience members think?

As far as this one is concerned, Snyder has crafted something beautifully idiosyncratic. The adaptation that doesn't entirely succeed at transferring the original text to screen, but functions as a pulsating, dazzling work of art on its own. Shakespeare would transmute stories into his plays, and though Snyder is no Shakespeare, there's something inescapably enthralling about his effort, warts and all. "Watchmen" is visceral, gory, sexy, cerebral and stirring.

Underlining the film is a theme of existential despair about the fate of humanity. Do we deserve what we bring upon ourselves in an era in which we're capable of wholesale destruction of our own species? The question plagues the characters of "Watchmen," a group of costumed heroes in an alternate 1985 that sees Richard Nixon (horribly imitated, one of the film's few serious blunders) as president and the world seemingly minutes away from nuclear annihilation. The murder of one in their ranks sets off an investigation that reveals a world-altering conspiracy of markedly complicated moral implications.

The heroes are an eclectic bunch to say the least. There's Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), an impotent inventor who has retired to purposelessness. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is a psychotic vigilante who wanders the streets looking for crooks to brutalize. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is an effeminate intellectual who has made billions cashing in on his image. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only one with actual superpowers, is a shimmering blue god who has lost interest in humanity, even the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), his girlfriend. And last but perhaps most importantly, there's the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a psychopathic rapist whose murder sets the plot in motion.

It's clearly not your usual big-budget comic book fare, but it's much better. The characters are captivating and unique, the action bloody and gruesome, the implications deep and demanding of analysis. Moore's complicated, twisted world has been brought to life after more than two decades of attempts, and for this fan it was worth the wait.