Watchmen is a 2009 superhero film directed by Zack Snyder and starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson. It is an adaptation of the comic book of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The film is set in an alternate-history 1985 at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, as a group of mostly retired vigilantes investigates an apparent conspiracy against them and uncovers something even more grandiose and sinister.