I don't understand all the Alan Moore/Watchmen discussion. It doesn't make any sense at all. Everyone knows Grant Morrison wrote Watchmen.
Proj wins the thread.
There's a guy with a signature on Newsaram that implies this very idea
You know.......... Alan Moore is a bit of a hypocritic isn't he?
He claims that things designed for one medium shouldn't be translated to another.
But the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did this exactly didn't it?
It took literary characters from the novel medium, and translated them to comics.
It's not the same thing. If Alan Moore had simply adapted the original
stories into the comics, then yes, it would be the same thing. He didn't. He took a bunch of public domain characters of the same era and created a genre-mosaic world out of those stories. He did this with TOP 10 too. Hollywood is just adapting his stories, instead of creating new things.
I'm sure V for Vendetta would've been a great movie if I hadn't read the comic first.
The problem with it is that it commits - in my mind - the biggest sin you can commit when adapting a comic book or graphic novel: it completely changed the message of the story, cutting out the pro-anarchy message for a more hollywood-friendly, vague, anti-authoritarian statement, which is indescribably lame. Change whatever aesthetic details you want, but change the entire point of the story and you've just taken a big old **** on its head.
I completely agree. Evey works for the BBC instead of being a desperate girl who starts the story with the intent of
becoming a whore. V's first appearance is turned into comedy with Evey's, "Are you, like, a crazy person?" This line, for me, summed up the stupidity of the movie: you have Natalie Portman putting on a bizarre English accent and saying a
grammatically Californian line. It's just stupid. No research.
And as for the final statement - instead of taking the poetic, and powerful pro-anarchy message (as you rightly put it), it ends with a bullet-time knife fight.
I just see no point in adapting something if you're so completely going to butcher it. The only reason you can do this is because 1) It's easier than coming up with something new by yourself and 2) You think you can
improve on it, which is all kinds of arrogant. The master adapters, never act like they can improve nor that it's easy. They pay respect to the original and to the craft. Just look at Akira Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD. It's the best film adaptation of Shakespeare I know of.
That's fair enough. I was the other way. Watched film and thought "Wow! I love this." then ran out and got comic. As a result I was a little disappointed the book wasn't more like the film. I know that's bad but I prefer the film. Most likely as you said I saw it before I read book.
I'm glad you got the comic. I read it before the film came out and it
haunted me for days. I just kept re-reading it. Different types for different people, I guess. :/
But the comic wasn't about Thatcherism, it was just a response to it. The times inspired the sentiment behind the book but it's power comes from the fact that Moore did very little to date it to current events.
I can't even imagine how dated the movie is going to look in 10-20 years.
Again, you're right. The movie is
already dated, while the graphic novel, I read in the 21st century, over 3 years after the comic is SET, and somehow even though it says "1997" on it, it still felt modern, relevant, and fresh. The movie - I felt like I'd already seen it while I was watching it for the first time.
Stephen Fry was kick-*** in it, though.
