Photo: Warner Bros/D.C. Comics

In the first five minutes of next March's movie adaptation of the 1980s graphic novel Watchmen, a Matrix-style fight sequence breaks out, complete with two superdudes punching through walls with their bare hands. Bam! Pow! Awesome! Except that it feels off-key, as if Michael Bay had directed Moby Dick and kicked it off with a slow-mo man-on-whale duel.

It's hard to explain the greatness of Watchmen to non-geeks: Its writer, Alan Moore, is the Bob Dylan of superhero comics, a genius who injected verbal virtuosity, formal sophistication and philosophical complexity into the form, and Watchmen is his masterpiece. Over the years, two of Hollywood's top surrealists have flirted with a Watchmen adaptation (Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky), but instead, the job went to Zack Snyder, a really good director of really dumb action movies, like 2006's dopey 300, a nearly shot-for-shot adaptation of another graphic novel.

Recently, Warner Bros. screened the first 20 minutes of Watchmen; it looks like the best parts of the movie come straight from the book, like a visually stunning sequence starring naked, blue-skinned, atomic-powered Dr. Manhattan. And the worst parts may well be everything else — especially since Snyder has admitted to altering the book's apocalyptic ending. But even if he botched it, he's given Moore's masterpiece a new life. I've even spotted actual females reading it on the subway. And that, at least, qualifies Snyder as some kind of superhero. BRIAN HIATT

• View List: The 2008 Hot List