Watching the Watchmen
This makes me very, very nervous.
I quit my comic book habit when I was about 13. Quit buying Amazing and Web of every month, quit caring if the Alicia Masters Skrull switcheroo had been planned all along or not. Even quit reading Wizard. I don’t think I made it to the Spider-Man clone scandal, and by the time the entire Marvel Universe started over (that happened, didn’t it? How stupid.), I was blissfully buried in the worlds of movies and indie rock, a relocation that has served me well to this day.
But sometimes you have to go visit your old stomping grounds. I did anyway. Mostly for one man: Alan Moore. To read V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but mostly for Watchmen.
Watchmen isn’t just the greatest comic book of all time. Oh, sure, it’s that. But it’s much more. It completely transcends comic books and enters into the realm of honest to God literature. It’s one of the most dazzlingly complicated, painfully human stories I’ve ever read, and it just happens to be about men and women who dress up in costumes and fight crime.
Now they’re going to make a movie out of it. It’s been in development since before I became a movie-gossip junkie. From Terry Gilliam’s planned 12-movie series to Darren Aronofsky’s flirtation (would there be hip-hop montages?) to the almost but not quite efforts of Paul Greengrass, the film has been through the Hollywood ringer.
And once again, it looks like it just might happen. With… Zach Snyder? Now, I know that reports of his work on 300 have been strong, but even the sporadically brilliant Wachowskis couldn’t help V for Vendetta. If any of the Moore adaptations had a chance to be not just a decent movie (like Constantine), but also a strong adaptation, V was it. But the Wachowskis mangled it. So we’re supposed to accept on geek-gossip faith that Snyder, whose only finished work was the fun but terribly unrestrained Dawn of the Dead remake, is the man for one of the most epic stories ever to hit the big screen? Gimme a break. I’d be nervous if James Cameron took the helm. What’s next—Brett Ratner making a decent X-Men film? I sense difficult times ahead.
posted by Peter @ 3/27/2006 03:10:00 PM
3 Comments:
Peter,
Here's my Unified Alan Moore Movie Theory:
The Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman movies that work well, do so, in part, because those characters are all brilliant creations, in their own right. Even last year's Fantastic Four movie, which doesn't even try to achieve 1% of the visual extravagance and elegance of Jack Kirby's comics, gets by on the strength of Kirby and Stan Lee's original characterizations. Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby were giants when it came to coming up with these explosive pop culture concepts. (Shuster and Siegel and Bob Kane and Bill Finger aren't giants, in that they more or less stumbled upon their great creations by accident, but they did manage to tap into some very powerful mojo). The movies based on these comics tend to be good based on the extent to which filmmakers can translate the basic of concepts to the screen.
The thing with Alan Moore is that he's not at all "creative" in the same way that Lee, Kirby, and Ditko (and others) were (or even in the same way that Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, or Grant Morrison are). Moore doesn't create his own powerful, potent, pop culture concepts: he takes other people's and turns them inside out or rearranges them or makes them answer all those unanswered subtextual questions that, not coincidentally, helped make these concepts powerful and potent to begin with. But that's what he does in From Hell with the Jack the Ripper created by fringe Ripperologists, in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? with Mort Weisinger era Superman, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with late 19th Century pulp/adventure/genre fiction, in V with ubermensch mystery men-type characters like The Shadow and Batman, and in Watchmen with Steve Ditko et al.'s Charlton heroes.
But when Movie Industry People look at his comics, all they see is the potent, powerful, pop cultural concept, and they ignore all the other stuff, i.e. the actual "Alan Moore" stuff. The way Movie People use his comics is a lot like the way they use Philip K. Dick's short stories: to provide a clever hook to hang a standard action thriller on.
Best,
Jon
Well, hopefully that will change with A Scanner Darkly (holy crap that just looks stunning), but yes. You're right. Can we get Brad Bird to direct Watchmen? Again, essentially?
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