10 Coolest Superhero Movie Scenes Ever

Thinking about how on earth a movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book Watchmen would work, the main issue on everyone’s minds was sheer scale.

After all, the book consisted of twelve chapters flashing back and forth through four decades of alternate US history, with plenty of backstory and additional characterisation fleshed out in supplemental pieces between episodes. It’s a dense, intricate read: doing the full story justice would require a miniseries, not a movie? Surely?

Zack Snyder’s effort wasn’t perfect - far from it. It’s a film with two good ideas, the remainder of the production devoted to unimaginative mimicry instead of adaptation.

One of those good ideas is the removal of the whole ‘space squid’ storyline, a development that simply wouldn’t have worked anywhere except in a comic book. Making Doctor Manhattan (a nuclear-powered superman who’s already in the movie) the boogeyman that unites the world against him streamlines the narrative by removing the need for at least two subplots completely. It’s also arguably far more credible for a twenty-first century movie audience than teleporting a vat-grown psychic god-squid into New York to kill the city in its death throes.

The other good idea wasn’t just good - it was inspired. Snyder spends the opening credits of the film recapping thirty years of the history of this alternate world in glorious montage, perfectly shot and edited to the tune of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’, a song written at the epicentre of political change in the US, about the unstoppable power of history.

It’s perfect: a statement of intent and a powerful narrative device that provides much of the background that flashbacks and supplemental material gave readers of the original comic book. It remains one of the most breathtakingly audacious ways of kicking off a movie in Hollywood history, and possibly the single most creative application of exposition in cinema.

The rest of the film is clumsy, bleak awfulness with flashes of real greatness, like most of Snyder’s output - but it could be argued that it would have been next to impossible for the film to live up to the brilliance of this first five minutes.