Watchmen: up, up and have it away I James Christopher's review I Blockbuster Buzz review I The most darkly ambitious of graphic novels I Interview with Dave Gribbons

Finally, after 23 years of tortured development, pinging from studio to studio, star to star, and even courtroom to courtroom, the Watchmen adaptation has arrived on screen. It’s not for the faint-hearted — and, despite the preponderance of Spandex outfits, capes and costumes, not for the kids either.

The movie, a 2¾ hour epic that had its world premiere in Leicester Square last night, is based on Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons's seminal graphic novel about a group of ex-superheroes coming to terms with themselves and an impending nuclear doomsday. For more than two decades a big screen adaptation has been the maddeningly elusive goal of directors such as Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky, and actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joaquin Phoenix.

Even when this $100 million version, directed by Zack Snyder, became the centre of a court battle between Hollywood studios (one accused the other of copyright violation, and blocked the movie’s release) it only added to the sense that Watchmen would never see the inside of a cinema.

The film that has emerged, however, is a mesmerising and brutalising experience, and will be, for some at least, more than worth the wait. Set in a mid-Eighties Manhattan of the comic book imagination, where “costumed vigilantes” have changed the course of US history (Nixon is saved, the Vietcong defeated, etc), the dense narrative unfolds as a whodunnit in the head of a psychopathic do-gooder called Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley). In Stygian nightscapes reminiscent of Taxi Driver and Seven, Rorschach visits his four former crime-fighting buddies, including Matthew Goode’s brainiac businessman Ozymandias and Malin Akerman’s killer femme Silk Spectre, in an attempt to expose a secret assassin who’s nurturing apocalyptic plans for the entire Eastern seaboard.

Along the way, limbs are broken, bones are smashed and skulls split as the film earns its unprecedented 18 certificate (the supposedly ultraviolent Dark Knight was a 12A). And it’s not just blood and guts. There is unwanted pregnancy, erectile dysfunction and deep sexual anxiety too. Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl, for instance, cannot “perform” unless he has beaten up some criminals first, while Billy Crudup’s fluorescent blue Dr Manhattan, complete with exposed genitalia, offers kinky yet loveless sex to Silk Spectre.

Add to this some startlingly incisive monologues on fascism, free will and American democracy, and you have a movie that is reaching utterly beyond the confines of its genre.

On the downside, the deadly serious nature of the project only highlights the many titter-inducing splashes of camp — the lair of Ozymandias, in particular, is very Kerpow!-era Batman. But as the first attempt to make a truly post-adolescent comic book movie, Watchmen is, literally, peerless.

- On general release from March 6

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