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The clock is ticking on "Watchmen" - finally opening in theaters Friday after more than 20 years of "To Be Continued ..."
A comic-book miniseries so ambitious, so culturally complex and so deconstructive of the superhero archetype that Time magazine in 2005 included it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923, "Watchmen" daunted such filmmakers as Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass as it wound its way through 20th Century Fox, Universal, Paramount and finally Warner Bros.
A faithful adaptation of the revered miniseries (see story on next page), the two-hour, 37-minute "Watchmen" follows the fates of several non-superpowered masked crime fighters and one genuine superhuman from 1940 to 1985, when the bulk of the story takes place.
The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a sociopath who is one of two government-sanctioned heroes, is murdered by an unknown assailant. When outlawed hero Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a madman-savant Ayn Randian in a trench coat, investigates, the mystery eventually ensnares hero-turned-philanthropist Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the voluntarily vanished Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman). She's now the consort of the government's other hero, the freakish Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a godlike molecular manipulator who lives unstuck in time and space.
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