There are perhaps several reasons of why not to see this month’s release of Warner Bros’ WATCHMEN. Firstly it’s produced by a major studio, who’s risk aversion, play-it-safe strategy goes completely at odds with the narrative’s view of sadomasochistic superheroes (although they have thrown in some slow-mo violence so that probably made it ok).
Secondly it’s directed by the fella who missed the point of Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD and somehow managed to make Frank Miller’s 300 even more fascistic (unbelievable I know). Add to that the fact that its been raped into a consumer cash cow (check out the Watchmen lunchboxes and Rorschach action figures!), been deemed unfilmible by genre heavy weight Terry Gilliam, written by the guy who also penned THE SCORPION KING and, interestingly had Zach the director already tell us that the DVD will be better.
But, of course, none of this really matters. Any film, regardless of how auspicious the origins, has the potential to be worthwhile. After all, this is also a project based on the work of one of the greatest writers of the late 20th century. But then that’s the problem, innit? Go and see the movie, and you won’t find the name Alan Moore anywhere. And for that reason, I’ll be staying at home.
I’ve been reading the work of Alan Moore since I was about 12 (not that I was incredibly advanced or anything, just that he wrote a comic with Batman in it) and since then his writings have been constantly by my side.
As a teenager I dug the ferocious anarchy of V for Vendtta But as an adult I’m still engaged, and perhaps even horrified, at how astute the comic was regarding modern Britain. For me From Hell used to be a cool horror story where you got to see people naked, now I see it as an explosive study of modern violence and government suppression (It also happens to be one of the finest novels written about the Whitechapel murders).
Y’see Moore has always been there for me; as a sort of creative and spiritual guide. He’s like one of those teachers who inspires you to think for yourself, to read great novels, to watch great films and who can blow your mind with a word. He’s never spoken down to me or spoon fed his ideas – and he can make me laugh like I just heard the killing joke.
The release of From Hell in 2001 left me giddy. A film based on an Alan Moore story! I love film; I love Alan Moore – what could go wrong? And Moore for his part (who has since been derided as a “crotchety old hippy” by ungrateful fan boys) was equally optimistic, stating:
“I’ve accepted that the film is only going to have a coincidental connection with my book. The Hughes brothers are good directors and I think Johnny Depp appears in some remarkable films.”
But then that was before. FROM HELL was a mess – a mockney music video staring a gimmicky actor who has since gone on to become one of the most overrated stars of his generation. Worse than that, Depp was becoming a Disney poster boy; a saturnine anti-establishment figure for people with two cars parked in the garage.
Despite his knowledge that the film wouldn’t be the comic, Moore was understandably peeved. The changes made to FROM HELL (the overemphasis on the romantic subplot, the casting of Heather Graham, the by-the-numbers narrative) were the kind made to accommodate the biggest audience possible – from bankers in the Midwest to teenagers out on a first date.
Aside from these disparate film fans, 20th Century Fox also wanted the holy grail of movie audiences – the teenage male with a disposable income.
To a lot of these kids (at that time me included) Moore was a kind of magical shaman who could burn ideas directly into your pulsing brain. The studios knew this and when they began buying up his work, it wasn’t the stories they wanted, it was the name – Alan Moore. They wanted to turn him into a brand, and to their horror, he wasn’t going to take it lying down.
LXG aka THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN was a nightmare – a bad acid trip – a distorted hallucination where friends become enemies and everything that is beautiful becomes weird and deranged. It pissed Moore off enough to insist his name be taken off every subsequent film adaptation of his work. He’d refuse payment too and see that every penny went to the artist. It wasn’t easy.
And so in a single gesture Alan Moore had lived up to everything he ever promised. He had defined what is to be an artist and to care about the work above all else. Filmmaker Alex Cox once stated that an artist must, “take a vow of poverty,” in order to remain free from petty bureaucrats and unnecessary compromise.
In fact Moore was doing this in comics too, leaving DC for the less despotic Top Shelf Productions. Today integrities a dirty word – so long as there’s a steady pay check in it, most people will do whatever you say. It’s the way of the world right?
But Moore showed another way, a way where stories are important – ideas the only commodity with any value. So I made a vow with him (not actually in person, though we are both Midlands boys – him from Northampton, me from Stoke) which in hindsight was a pretty feeble gesture on my part.
My vow was to not pay to see any of these supposed adaptations (feeble because I knew this would allow me catch them later on TV). No, Sir the studio conglomerates wouldn’t be getting my hard earned money this time (not over this). And so, pathetic as my vow was, I still managed to stick to it and later watched both LXG and CONSTANTINE - based on the character created by Moore in The Saga of the Swamp Thing Issue #37- on terrestrial television.
As a side note, I found CONSTANTINE harder to bear. Mainly because the character from the comics was one of the mediums finest creations – a smart arsed working class Londoner who jobs around as a psychic detective – and to see him played so vacantly and portentously by Keanu Reeves was akin to having the devil pluck out my eyeballs and use them in a game of miniature golf.
But as bad as these films were (and by God they were bad) it was V FOR VENDETTA (2005) that forced my hand even further. Arguably the most successful of the Moore ‘adaptations’ (certainly in terms of being relatively faithful to the source) but from the first frame I felt sick. The world created by director James McTeigue was just so slick. The comic was a dingy, kitchen sink fantasy that could have been made into a film by Ken Loach (if he did that sort of thing).
It presented the decay of Thatcher’s Britain in everything but name. This was a film that seemed ‘cool’ in the worst Blairite way. Everything was shiny: the cars, the buildings, Natalie Portman. It just felt so…so Hollywood, a factor that rendered its theme of social anarchy totally impotent. But it wasn’t even this that made me feel ill. It was the betrayal – the betrayal I felt at standing with the corporations against Moore. It had to stop.
So for this reason I won’t be seeing WATCHMEN – not at the cinema, not on DVD or Freeview or on Channel 4 in ten years time. Because being an artist should mean something. Taking a stand for you principles should mean something. People like Moore are in the minority and the fact that they stand on the fringes of society leaves them open to ridicule.
We live in such an apathetic world but when someone stands up for something worthwhile it is our duty to stand with them. These people should be championed, encouraged and given favour over the empty drones that want to control our lives with a fistful of dollars.
In Watchmen (the comic at least) Moore paints a world without heroes. Weirdly, here in the real world, I seem to have found one – and best of all, he’s a grumpy old magician from the East Midlands.
The first part of Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century is released at the end of April.
19 Comments
Well said.
-comic fan since birth.
Exceptional article Tom mate- I wholeheartedly agree with most of the things you said. Only one thing- Constantine is a Scouser, not a Londoner! The age-old North South divide…
It’s your loss. Watchman was a great film that ultimately met most of it’s goals. You can take the moral highground all you want but Alan Moore is quite understandably a sourpuss now regardless and all you so called fans can carry on in your ignorance, meanwhile i’ll continue to watch and enjoy a soon to be classic.
Holy crap…get over it. Enjoy life!!! It’s by far the best Moore adaption.
I love people who defend Alan Moore. Its great to wake up and read a hilarious article because you almost sound sarcastic in how zealous you. Seriously, the guy is a great author, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also so one of the biggest assholes walking the face of the earth. You don’t want your name on the film? Fine, but stop bitching when the film goes to be made if you want nothing to do with it. You just draw attention to yourself and the film, which is what I find ironic about it. I told a couple of my friends that had never read the graphic novel that the author already condemned the film before it was made, and it made them want to see it more just to see if it really was going to be that bad. His complaining is just free promotion for the films that he doesn’t want people to see.
I understand he feels screwed over because he thinks he was duped back in the 80s when he sold a lot of the rights to his work, but the fact stands that he sold it. He needs to stop being a child and grow up. If he’s that pissed off, he can sue them. Hell, he’d probably win nowadays.
If you don’t want to see a good, not great, but good movie then that’s your problem. But don’t decide to not see it because because some grumpy, bitter old man says he doesn’t support it. Decide not to because YOU don’t think the movie will be good.
Good stuff mate, I had a good laugh into my cornflakes this morning. I think Watchmen the motion picture will be regarded much in the same way as Fight Club. V for Vendetta was a cool flick too, too bad you cannot pull your head out of your arse.
Well i’ve tried to both enjoy life and pull my head out of my arse but I can’t really seem to.
Plus, I’m basically a grumpy, bitter young man, so me and Mr Moore have a lot in common. And y’know, while not going to see Watchmen because i’m an arsehole maybe true, it doesn’t make much of an article.
Bad form on my part though for calling Constantine a Londoner, though.
I didn’t care much for WATCHMEN the movie. Far too much backstory was included and it severely cluttered up the film’s pace. And that softcore sex scene with “Hallelujah” playing in the background was utterly cringe worthy.
The funny thing is that I think it won’t go down in history as a truly great comic book movie – whereas THE DARK KNIGHT will – precisely because it panders too much to a hardcore fanbase that was never going to be wholly satisfied with the end product. That is, its target audience is you, Tom, and it pays a heavy cinematic price for it. Rather than make the material his own Snyder opts for a slavishly faithful adaptation which can never do justice to a great work of art designed for a very different medium.
By the way, God help us if anybody tries to pull something similar off with “Preacher”, another classic comic book film project which has been on the cards for a while now. Talk of Sam Mendes and John August getting involved is promising, but any standalone “Preacher” film is almost certainly guaranteed to be a serious disappointment. Personally I think Garth Ennis’s masterpiece would be best served as an HBO-style TV series, but a film trilogy might work also.
HBO was going to do “Preacher”, but I’m glad it fell apart since James Marsden was going to play Jesse. That would have been disastrous. Also, I read a rumor somewhere, and you know what that means on the internet, that Mendes wants to make a trilogy of “Preacher” movies, but film them all at once to keep cohesion.
Tom, I understand you’re point about being a bitter young man. I’m as cynical as anyone honestly. But I couldn’t deny myself finally seeing Watchmen on the big screen. It wasn’t perfect by any means, and it had pacing issues as Alex brought up. But overall it wasn’t that bad.
A “Preacher” trilogy shot all at once, helmed by Sam Mendes and penned by John August sounds like a pretty good solution to me, although I doubt anything they can do will better or even equal the source material.
From what I’ve read Garth Ennis is willing to acquiesce and even collaborate with a project which takes the material in new directions. He doesn’t come across as such a prima donna as Moore, who sometimes gives the impression that he loves to live up to the misunderstood artist cliché.
By the way, I’ve got a query for Tom regarding his OP. I actually enjoyed FROM HELL. Not a masterpiece but the film brings out the novel’s themes quite well in my opinion. I was wondering why you think Heather Mills was such a terrible choice to play Mary Kelly. Granted she wasn’t great in the part but she didn’t really ruin the film, did she? Who would you have cast?
I get the impression that a lot of what you wrote has to do with that feeling of disappointment we all get when something with an aura of obscurity that we treasure becomes fully mainstream.
Well, I think her casting (Graham not Mills) was symptomatic of the commercialization of the story. I mean, the original Moore story was unfilmable – because of its structure and characterization and its sense of a sleazy reality.
Hollywood just won’t take those kind of chances. They won’t. Too much money to be lost. Unfortunately they’re the only people who could afford to make it.
So you get pretty young people going through the motions in a by-the-numbers whodunit. I think it’s fair that you liked it, Alex, but that stuff isn’t really for me.
Plus Moore’s main intention with the book, I feel, was to do an autopsy of a real crime. The film isn’t that at all.
A better onscreen version of the Ripper/Royal family conspiracy is Bob Clark’s Murder by Decree (1979)
And is Alan Moore really that obscure? I bought my version of From Hell from Waterstone’s.
No, he isn’t, although the way some fans act it’s as if they were the only ones who had ever heard of him before the movies based on his books were made. Not saying that necessarily applies to you, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
I don’t think FROM HELL is a mere whodunit. It retains several of the key themes from the novel, especially the central idea that the 20th century starts with Jack the Ripper. It also retains the critique of misogyny, the use of prostitutes as a symbol of continuing enslavement in modernity, and to a lesser extent, Moore’s fascination with the occult. These elements are made to serve the plot in a much more strict and reductive manner because that’s the only way cinematic storytelling functions adequately. The medium simply isn’t cut out for the kind of narrative digressions that the graphic novel – or any type of novel for that matter – does so well. And I think that applies to Hollywood and almost any other successful film industry. In any case I don’t agree that the film is just a dumbed-down version of the source material, as you seem to imply.
By the way, its a good job that I don’t go in much for Freud, because I’m completely at a loss as to why I mixed Heather Graham up with Heather Mills.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree, Alex. But some really interesting points about the film.
I always tend to think that when a film like this is being clever, it’s usually accidental. But that, I suppose, is my own personal prejudice.
Mills, Graham – what’s the difference?
Ok Tom, we’ll agree to disagree. Didn’t mean to be in your face about it, I just love to debate stuff.
Oh, no, man you weren’t in my face at all. Like I said you made some really good points – actually whetted my appetite for the From Hell comic again.
Cheers, Alex
Cheer, up, man..
Sorry to say this, but I actually liked the movie more than the graphic novel, especially the ending.
Well, too bad for you, because you’ll miss out on a brilliant piece of filmmaking, and a heartwarmingly respectful adaptation at that. Alan Moore (and you) had every right to feel betrayed by the previous films you mention, but not this time around. It’s a wonderful movie which should be treated as a great companion to the original book, since both are top class.