We should take time to pause, in our-day-to-day lives, to contemplate some of the small yet all-important questions of life. For example: is it really wise to adapt an Alan Moore comic anymore?Moore is one of the biggest names in comics; to those of us who live panel-to-panel, he is nothing short of the second coming, a genius who knows no comparison, who redefined comics and practically invented the whole Graphic Novel thing.
Personally, I never thought that Alan Moore was all that great as a writer; but a lot of that is just personal preference. He is incredibly postmodern, valuing plot and drama over emotion. His characters are dense, but hardly ever sympathetic; the best way that I can say it is that they are the deepest that two dimensions can go. Never at once do they seem human, but never at once is that, well, a bad thing.
The same can be said of Moore's universes that he creates; the dystopic versions of the world that are so outstandingly dense and complex that you start to think that they're real but, at the same time, they stand firmly fictional. And they're all pretty pessimistic, too; I don't think that any of us would want to live in whatever version of London Alan Moore cooks up in his (well, more popular) Graphic Novels.
But it's all right, because in the end he's a goddamn good storyteller, in that he weaves yarns that keep you interested, intrigued, and just uncomfortable enough to like it. That, and he's written what might be one of the finest Graphic Novels ever, and possibly the finest work of fiction in the past 30 years: Watchmen.
But let's backtrack a bit: off the top of my head, there are three Alan Moore series that have been adapted, in chronological order: From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta.
I've never seen the adaptation of From Hell, but I trudged through the 400+ page graphic novel, and I'm pretty sure that the movie didn't come close. The novel details Moore's own theory about the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, which can be summarized as: the prince has an illegitimate child, and all the prostitutes who know about it have to be murdered by the royal family physician, who just happens to be a closet psychopath. Then you add on about forty more characters, half a dozen other plots, and you get close to the real thing. It wasn't bad when I read it, but the plot seemed to spin so endlessly, and Moore took so long waxing on and on about moments that, eventually, it over-spun itself and by now I've completely forgotten about it.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, however, I do remember. Not only does it pander to the dorkiest of literary/historical nerds, but Kevin O'Neill's artwork is just damn beautiful and perfect for the script. I don't want to get too much into the details of it, since that would take too long, but--basically--the British government, in the middle of the Victorian period, employs a secret team of extraordinary individuals to combat the more, erm, extraordinary adversaries to the crown. The series stars, mainly, Alan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Dr Jekyll, Captain Nemo, and the Invisible Man, all of whom are altered from their literary counterparts in order to create more realistic, sympathetic characters that the modern audience would understand and appreciate.
And what does Hollywood do? Alan Quartermain turns from an emaciated opium addict into
a slightly curmudgeony older fellow, the invisible man changes from a rapist into comic relief, Mina Harker goes from being a mastermind with a shady past to a vampiric sex kitten, and they add Dorian Grey and Tom Sawyer for, I guess, show. Anyway, both Moore and O'Neill detested the adaptation, which wasn't terrible, but when you put it up against its original...well, you get the point.
Then there's V for Vendetta. The graphic novel tells a story of (suprise!) a dystopic Britain after the events of a nuclear holocaust, which has landed it under the control of Adam Susan, the leader of a Neo-Fascist party called Norsefire. Most people, who are idiots, seem to go along with the takeover, and ignore the deportation of all the folks who are, in any way, a deviant from the regular ol' Aryan race: gays, jews, black, muslims. These people get shuttled off to concentration camps where they're tortured and murdered in the thousands, while those that survive are pumped full of chemicals and toxins until they, too, die. One of the victims, however, created a makeshift bomb out of fertilizer, blows the camp to smithereens, and is the only prisoner to escape, though severely burned and mentally, shall we say, unstable. Ten or so years later, this man calls himself V, and has been tapping into Norsefire, planning its destruction while setting up the reign of anarchy that is to follow. Along the way he meets a young worker-turned prostitute named Evey, who helps him, leaves him, gets kidnapped, finds out that it was V's idea the whole time, and then in the finale emerges triumphantly to take over the mantle that V leaves empty with his death. Of course it's more complicated than that, and Moore takes time to involve all of the high-ranking members of the government into the plot, until they all seem to fit together perfectly, creating a rich and all-encompassing landscape.
The film, of course, is very different, though if you follow the old rule of "judge a film by itself, not by what it was adapted from", then we can't really say that it was a bad movie. But having the knowledge of the original taints one's perception of the film, and it's hard to get away from that. The film is like this: there's a totalitarian gov't running England, run by Adam Sutler. This girl, Evey, tries to leave her house in London after curfew, almost gets raped by the cops, is saved by the poetic V, helps him, leaves him, hangs out with her gay friend, gets kidnapped, blah blah blah, then V dies and a bunch of people wear masks. And while the special effects are formidable (thanks, Wachowski bros), the script is, at times, downright gagworthy; like a fifteen-year-old theatre geek's British impression: every other word is "bollocks". And the film's use of biological weapons instead of nuclear weapons and making Evey a more regular girl with a sad past is too cliché and kills any of the novel's layers. But hey, at least it looks nice.
Which brings us to Watchmen, a film that Moore has said time and time again shouldn't be made, as it has no cinematic qualities, it's all internal, yadda yadda. The truth is: yes, it could be made. If it was done by the right person.
I have a feeling that Zack Snyder is not the right person.
To be fair, I've never seen 300. But I don't think that's a crime. Truthfully, I got over Frank Miller after about a year, and that includes Sin City. And no, I'm not looking forward to The Spirit. Anyway, I had no investment into seeing 300, since I had browsed through the comic and figured it was Frank Miller doing his "violence is awesome, characters are lame" thing that carried, like, at least 60% of Sin City and hung around too much with The Dark Knight Returns. Oh, and the film looked stupid.
Seems from reviews that I was generally right; if I had watched a few minutes of the special effects crap then I would be getting all of it. And hey, the effects looked good. It was as faithful to the comic book as Sin City had been so far as shot-by-shot goes, so I have total respect for that.
But there's a reason why Alan Moore's graphic novels do so well: because they're graphic novels. If it was all reading and no seeing, then they wouldn't be interesting and would have no way of being so erratic. If it was all looking and no dialogue, then the same thing would happen: you wouldn't give a damn. It's one thing to make a panel-by-panel world come to life, it's another thing to adapt a story. On film it needs to be more real, more believable, Snyder can't just show, for example, Night Owl and Silk Spectre II getting it on after a few night's hanging out, he would have to pick up the subtle movements in their faces, the change in tone, he would have to show them really, truly, falling in love. There's a deep level of complexity to the whole deal that goes into making a film. You can't just recreate the storyboards and have people wear costumes and stand in and say "done!". If it was that simple, this would have been done years ago.
That being said, after the trailer came out today (I'll be seeing it on the big screen when it preludes The Dark Knight, as soon as I get a chance to see that), I've lost a tad bit of my skepticism. I mean, the movie seems beautiful to looks at (barring a couple "I hate that" moments, mostly with Silk Spectre II and Ozymandias' costumes, which I respect for a more 'modern' update, but hate because...I don't need a reason. I just hate them.), Dr Manhattan's update seems to be the best part (I noticed a lot of hate-ons in the Youtube comments, which I also get), though I don't really see Billy Crudup in the role so much as I would like to, but they get his otherworldliness down pat. Rorschach, for the time he's up there, seems to be correct enough, as does the Comedian and Nite Owl, though I have no idea when he screams or, for that matter, really fights people that much. All in all, my greatest fear is that they'll make it this big action movie and ruin the good thoughtful stuff that's in the Novel. I remember seeing an interview with Snyder a year or so ago and he said that he was going for the R rating so that he could feel free to show the--well, I won't say it outright, just that it was the thing from Rorschach's past that pushed him over the edge--and I remember thinking; that part doesn't matter so much as Dr Manhattan's issue on time and his biography, or the entries of Rorschach's journal, or Nite Owl's conflicted feelings between the safety of civilian life and the joy of the older days of hero work.
Anyway, I'm hoping that those things will bleed through the visual Oktoberfest that the trailer suggests. Here's the clip:
