C-

People are going to react very differently to “Watchmen,” the epic-sized adaptation by Zack Snyder (“300”) of the 12-part 1986-7 comic mini-series by genre guru Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons that was quickly reprinted as a graphic novel and, along with Frank Miller’s contemporaneous “The Dark Knight Returns,” marked a watershed in the medium. Various filmmakers have been trying for decades to bring it to the screen, but it proved a tough nut to crack, and now that Snyder’s managed to do so, the result is likely to divide the original’s devoted admirers while failing to satisfy those coming to it without prior acquaintance. (Moore himself, who put up with what he considered bastardizations of his later work in “V for Vendetta,” “From Hell” and especially “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” disowned the whole project and demanded that his name be removed from it.)

Readers who’ve embraced the bleak, genre-bending vision of the book—about a group of retired (indeed, outlawed) costumed heroes in an “alternate” eighties America where Richard Nixon is in his fifth term and the world is on the brink of nuclear war, who reemerge to solve the murder of one of their own—actually have a good deal to celebrate here. Scripters David Haynter and Alex Tse have lifted much of the dialogue from the book, and Snyder is obviously in love with his source, using his formidable visual prowess (and access to a big budget and an army of technicians) to realize on screen the look of Gibbons’ panels. Just from those perspectives, if you’re a Moore acolyte even the 161 minutes lavished on “Watchmen” will seem too few.

And yet some of the book’s devotees are going to be dissatisfied. They’re likely to accept, grudgingly, most of the excisions and compressions, understanding that the material had to be whittled down if it was going to be a feature rather than a mini-series. But they’re going to be really peeved about major changes, especially in the ending. And they have a right to be. It seems simply incongruous for Snyder to have aimed so obsessively for the kind of visual fidelity to the book that fans would appreciate and approached the material almost as though it were Holy Writ for the most part, but then to have altered Moore’s plot in important ways. What’s the point?

Well, I suppose that the reason is obvious—he also wanted to appeal to a wider audience, which just might swallow the new concluding twist more easily than they would have Moore’s nuttier contrivance. (The change also made it easier for the effects team, but surely so crass a motive wouldn’t have swayed Snyder.)

But if that’s the motive, it’s unlikely to succeed, first of all because it’s improbable that a film that offers a political vision even darker and more dystopian that the oppressive dictatorship of “Vendetta” will appeal in today’s U.S.A. Snyder’s “Watchmen” seems more attuned to the zeitgeist of the Bush-Cheney years than to the opening of an Obama presidency. The timing is off. And by trying essentially to be a movie made for a bunch of fans while simultaneously appealing to a mass audience, it may well fail at both: whether it will expand the base or be confined to the one it began with (and disappoint some of it) is an open question.

That’s especially the case because if one approaches it cold, without reverence for the Moore-Gibbons original, it’s technically impressive, but also ponderous, self-important, unpleasantly violent and, quite frankly, kind of silly. Let me confess that I’m not a groupie. I have read “Watchmen,” but more out of a sense of duty than devotion, and while I appreciated Moore’s attempt to re-imagine the psychological underpinnings of the entire costumed-hero mythology, it didn’t quite come off—partially because the mystery at the heart of the plot was obvious, but also because the freshly-minted characters didn’t have the lived-in familiarity of the super-heroes who’d inhabited the comic pages for decades. They were pale imitations of the “real” thing. And frankly Moore’s political views represented—like those in “Vendetta”—a sort of radical chic that felt more like a pose than a deeply held belief.

These weaknesses are exacerbated in the film. The urban landscape is impressively created, but it’s the same sort of forbidding, rain-soaked, gloomy place we’ve seen in lots of earlier pictures. The “whodunit” part of the plot never grabs us, because the victim, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is a brutish, vicious thug and the shamus who’s obsessed with tracking down the truth—Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a vigilante who wears a white mask on which black blotches continually change shape—is as psychopathic as the villains he tracks down. (Sure, that’s the idea—but it makes him as difficult to connect with as the terrorist in “Vendetta.” And the reams of hard-boiled narration he has to deliver is the sort of overripe prose one can tolerate much more easily in print than as “drama.”)

Nor do the other characters generate much voltage, despite the fact that one—Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), is an astronomically powerful turquoise-colored humanoid formed from one of those scientific accidents that recur in the genre. He’s initially partnered with the generically svelte Silk Sceptre (Malin Akerman), but she eventually turns to someone who can get intimate with her without dividing into several copies of himself as Manhattan does—the blandly boyish Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), a sort of Batman Lite with a fancy flying ship among other tools of the crime-fighting trade. The final member of the group is Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), who humbly styles himself as the Smartest Man in the World and has used his brain to build a huge business empire.

In the time allotted to them within a single feature, these characters never fill out beyond sketch status, and as a result the parts don’t afford much opportunity for the actors to shine, especially since Snyder appears much more interested in posing them within his carefully-framed compositions than anything else. Haley fares best, simply because the combination of badass attitude and diminutive physique has a certain amusing quality. But Wilson and Akerman are ordinary, Goode overdoes the effete snob routine, and Morgan seems to be channeling J.K. Simmon’s Jonah Jameson at a far nastier level. Then there’s Crudup, a good actor so totally submerged in effects that he practically disappears. (His flashback autobiography is the best one in a movie filled with them, as the book was—though, true to tell, that isn’t saying much.)

To be fair, there are a few elements of the picture that do work unreservedly. The opening credit sequence is inventive and wondrously crafted, promising more than the film itself delivers. And it’s enjoyable to watch Robert Wisden do his Nixon imitation, though the cartoonish fake nose looks more like Cyrano or Bob Hope, as well as the briefer appearances by the likes of Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan, Ted Koppel, John McLaughlin and Eleanor Clift. But for the most part the picture has a solemn, ponderous, pretentious air that grows progressively wearisome over more than two-and-a-half hours—at least for one who doesn’t hold Moore’s book as the revelatory accomplishment many consider it to be.

So “Watchmen” turns out to be a $100 million cult movie that some fans may adore—if they can stomach the changes; but despite the visual virtuosity, it will bore many if not most of the uninitiated.

D

One doesn’t expect a great deal of intelligence in a film about bloodthirsty folk, infected by a “rage virus,” who chase the unaffected with the intent of chomping them to bits. But this sequel to the hit “28 Days Later” is based on a premise, and filled with characters, that are a lot dumber than they needed to be.

The idea is that after 28 weeks, the ghouls who nearly depopulated England have themselves died off of starvation, and a NATO-authorized force of American troops have arrived to seal off a section of London where those free of the ailment can begin resettlement. One of those brought to Dog’s Island in the British capital is Don (Robert Carlyle), who—as we see in a prologue—ran away like a coward from the cottage where he was holed up in the original assault, leaving his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) to die at the jaws of the marauders, along with all the other people who’d taken shelter in the remote house. Happily his children, Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots), were away on a school trip on the continent when the epidemic struck, and now they’re returned from Spain to join their Dad in a high-rise apartment in the so-called “green zone” that none of the residents are supposed to leave (the rest of the metropolis still filled with rotting corpses, untouched debris and unknown dangers).

Now you might immediately ask: why would one begin resettlement plan in such a desolate urban jungle, rather than in some secluded area that could be easily controlled? Why, for the sake of “The World, The Flesh and the Devil” visuals of abandoned streets and empty landmarks, of course. There’s no other reasonable explanation.

Of course, once the premise is set, things have to go wrong, very wrong. So it’s not surprising that the U.S. army’s security in London’s post-infection “green zone” is no better than that in Baghdad’s post-invasion one. Not only do the troops under the command of General Stone (Idris Elba), including regular fella sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner), allow Andy and Tammy to escape the protected area and make their way back to their old London house, but they then bring back to the zone not only the kids, but Alice—who had unaccountably made her way back home after being abandoned by Don (no explanation of how she escaped certain death is ever given) and has been living in hiding there ever since (on what she subsisted is never indicated, either).

And that’s not all: they leave Alice completely alone in the medical unit, strapped to a gurney, and then don’t notice that Don sneaks in to see her. Naturally, bad stuff results, since she’s a carrier of the infection though unaffected by it herself, and she immediately turns hubby into a raving ghoul, starting the whole process over again. Of course, the military forces, try as they might to contain the renewed outbreak by killing all the re-settlers, can’t get them all, so soon there are bands of the infected running about the city and chasing our heroes—Andy, Tammy, Doyle and Scarlet (Rose Byrne), a doctor who’s trying to save the children and get them out of the country in the hope that their blood will carry their mother’s immunity to the plague and serve to develop an antidote to it. Needless to say, the now-gruesome Don turns up whenever the script demands a shock to menace the kids and their protectors, and in his absence General Stone’s troops can be relied on to show up and threaten them. As if all that weren’t enough, there’s a “twist” ending that couldn’t be more obvious—or more threatening in terms of a third installment.

What’s unclear about all this is why we should have the slightest concern for Andy and Tammy at all, since they’re the nitwits who cause all the trouble by using their first day back in England to break the rules and thereby bring about the renewal of the epidemic. Of course if they hadn’t done that, there would have been no movie, but that would have been a blessing.

“28 Weeks Later” was co-written and directed by Juan Carlo Fresnadillo, best known for the offbeat but mediocre “Intacto,” and unfortunately his helming is no better than his scripting. Pretty much everything in the picture is a mindless blur, the visual cacophony accentuated by jittery, hand-held cinematography by Enrique Chediak that also overuses extreme close-ups and crazy-quilt editing that, together with the use of strobe lighting effects (and some particularly ugly “Blair Witch”-like night vision sequences), makes for a hundred minutes that irritate the eyes something fierce. (There’s plenty of bloodletting, of course, but the murkiness makes it less offensive than it might have been.) One’s ears are tested, too, by the blaring music and sound effects.

As to the cast, youngsters Muggleton and Poots come off best, especially the former, whose tight-jawed imperturbability is sometimes reminiscent of Michael Baldwin in the original “Phantasm.” (Can’t you just imagine “Muggleton and Poots” as a bad vaudeville act at an English music hall, or the name of a London boot shop?) Playing an ordinary Joe, Renner doesn’t fulfill the promise of “Dahmer,” though he does have a nifty farewell scene, and Byrne is annoyingly stiff as the femme medico. As for Carlyle, he plays things too broadly even before he turns, and afterward he chews up everything in sight literally as well as figuratively.

There’s a ready audience for “28 Weeks Later,” so it will probably do well. But even for a zombie-ghoul movie, its idiocy is beyond the pale.