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A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the "Doomsday Clock" - which charts the USA's tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion—a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers—Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen?

From the moment Zia (Patrick Fugit) cuts his wrists and enters a bizarre afterlife reserved for suicides, this film becomes a strangely uplifting, darkly comic tale about a journey through the hereafter. This is a world where everyone still bears the scars earned from the manner in which they "offed" while the everyday reality is a twisted mirror image of our own mortal world. When Zia begins his search for his long lost love, he encounters a variety of memorable individuals, be it a disillusioned suicide bomber or an angel in disguise. But it is in Eugene (Shea Whigham), an inscrutable Russian musician, and Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), an accidental tourist, that he finds his closest friends. This trio of lost souls forms an uncommon bond as they set out on a journey across the afterlife in search of what they could not find in their previous lives.