Watchmen (film)

Watchmen is the 2009 Warner Bros. feature film adaptation of the the DC/Vertigo comic book series created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

The movie tells of an alternate world where ordinary people take to the streets as costumed vigilantes starting in 1939. Aside from this the world is similar to our reality in that these media celebrities have no super-human abilities. That changes in 1969 when physicist Dr. Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) disintegrates himself in a lab accident and miraculously re-integrates himself as Dr. Manhattan, a being with God-like control over quantum the atomic structure of the world. As the world evolves away from ours, new heroes emerge like Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).

When the first generation vigilante The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is killed, Rorschach doggedly investigates, re-uniting with past heroes and unraveling an Earth-shattering conspiracy.

Directed by Zack Snyder from as script by David Hayter and Alex Tse, Watchmen is an undeniably ambitious attempt to capture the tone and story of the densely-crafted source material. The movie is highly-regarded by many, but shunned by others. 

The big-budget Watchmen was a disappointment at the box office, making its money back but not serving as the event pic that the studio had hoped for. It was followed by the 2019 Watchmen TV series, which is a direct sequel to the comics, and not the film, given its references to events that were omitted from the movie.