Film Blogs

This past Sunday, I recently purchased a DVD copy of Zack Snyder's screen adaptation of Allan Moore's much praised comicbook metatext, Watchmen.

As a follower of Moore's work, and a cinephile conscious of how the Hollywood dollar is able to murder Moore's largely anti-commercial writing and pervert into something ugly, I faced the release of Watchmen earlier this year with a mixture of excitement and foreboding. Like any true fan, I was adamant to read Moore's graphic novel before the film had a chance to possibly sully it (as had been the case with Steven Norrington's mangled carcass of a film which was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), even going so far as to reject several invites to attend the film's cinema release. 

So there I sat in my cold, desolate room in front of my small TV. A solitary cinephile praying that he had not wasted his money on another big dumb action film. Thankfully, these prayers were answered. Snyder, it seems, made sure that he blatantly nailed his own love for Moore clearly to the wall and created a well thought out, respectful screen adaption with the colourful palate of Mystery Men, the obsurd violence of Sin City and the political satire of Dr. Strangelove. In short, the sort of visual orgasm that one wishes every film could be:artistically astute yet commercially viable. More importantly, the film managed to encapsulate more of Moore's dense academia than ever before. With actor/screenwriter and cult icon David "Solid Snake" Hayter charged with penning rights, Allan Moore's political satire has never been more realised, pages upon pages of Moore and Gibbons' graphic novel are crammed in to a few densely streamlined, sleakly edited montages. Cold War dystopic visions are distilled into easy to understand chunks, and Moore's cynical nihilistic social commentary about the myth of heroism is not lost on the audience. 

In some respects, this is not surprising. Fans of the Metal Gear Solid video game series will understand Hayter's own fondness for densely packed political stories, and Snyder is simply combining his previous political leanings in Dawn of the Dead with the comic book sensabilities he developed during his adaptation of Frank Miller's 300.  However, that is not to say that the film isn't flawed. Whilst, Snyder and Hayter do well with what they are respectively given, Watchmen suffers the same problem as previous attempts to adapt Allan Moore in that it is still unable to provide the necessary epic cross-section of society or offer enough detail into some of the more difficult to explain aspects of Moore's writing. For one, it neglects many of the biographic segments about each character; Hollus Mason outlining and then berating the vigilante ethos in Under the Hood, Dan Dreiberg's ornithological analysis of the Owl as nocturnal predator in Blood from the Shoulder of Pallus, the psychologial profile of Rorshach and political subtexts of Dr. Manhattan. All are issues which in their own right require more time so as to ensure that these allegories of DC's Justice League come across as more than simply the charicatures to which the audience percieves them. 

Herein lies the problem with all attempts thus far at adapting the works of Allan Moore. With the notable exception of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, whilst these films are in themselves excellent pieces of stand alone art each of them seems to fall short of matching Allan Moore's brutal literary honesty. Of the three other editions to this cannon of Moore Adaptations, the one which comes closest to matching Watchmen's level of accuracy is V for Vendetta. British director James McTeigue and the Wachowski's (of The Matrix fame obviously) did express a strong grasp and understanding of both Moore's writing and the politcal instability of Britain's blood-soaked history, but kept the story too linear to ever gain approval from the writer (perhaps an impossible feat?) and his more die-hard fans. Moore's biggest problem with the media, a problem shared by so many academics, is that the industry's ravenous search for the all mighty dollar causes a patronizing simplification of historical and literary fact in the hopes of appealling to the lowest common denominator. As such V for Vendetta loses much of its terrifying power. This is even more true of From Hell. Seasoned Ripperologist or not, any one who has the patience to read through the densely metaphysical 500+ pages of From Hell will tell you that there are a lot of heavy issues to wade through and in some respects it is a miracle that the Hughes Brothers (also known for directoring several music videos for KoRn) were able to make an engaging, cohesive film out of it at all.
 
When one gets down to the bare bones of this argument, this one opinion remains: Allan Moore's graphic novels may in fact be unfilmable.  It is no secret that the writer holds a bitter contempt for the film industry and as such may be deliberately creating such epic masterpieces of academic meaning purely as a result of this hatred. Eitherway, his work has nonetheless won him the title of the graphic literature medium's greatest living writer (whose only possible equals are manga writers Kazuo Koike and Katsushiro Otomo) and in years to come will no doubt be as renowned as Shakespeare and Dickens. These films, though imperfect, help to cement that reputation and thanks to digital media even the thought that his writing is unfilmable will soon be a thing of the past. No one said that a film could be made of Lord of the Rings, though Peter Jackson managed to achieve that feat and insodoing became one of cinemas last great autuers. Therefore, I now wait with baited breath and a sense of optimism in the hope that in natural progession the next stab at adapting Allan Moore shall be even closer to perfect.