The Film Library

Alan Moore Knows the Score

Alan Moore, my favorite comics author of all time, has been getting a lot of publicity lately. At least, a lot of publicity considering he "retired" a few years back when he turned 50. Watchmen the movie is getting nearer to completion, he just released the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, the Black Dossier, and he had a recent guest spot on The Simpsons. It's that last one that throws me a bit; Alan Moore is such a hermit, and seems such an iconoclast, the severe, important artiste, that to see him on the Simpsons, tearing off his shirt and forming an odd superhero group with fellow artists Daniel Clowes(Ghost World) and Art Spiegelman(Maus) was almost beyond belief. Alan Moore is already known to movie audiences, even if they don't technically know of him. Many of his works have been adapted for the screen so far, and every single one was done without his support, which explains the lackluster finished results. When I call Alan Moore a master of the comics medium, what I mean is that he writes stories that could only exist as comics, that are so perfectly suited to the style of comic books that it elevates the form to become something greater than the phrase 'comic book' would imply.

This is not really an easy thing to convince people of. It's hard to get across how unbelievably cool the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is when competing with the recent memory of that Sean Connery film that for awhile flirted with modernizing the name to LXG and turned Edward Hyde into a noble hero. The comic book is one of the coolest things I've ever read, and is even cooler the more Victorian literature your familiar with. I'd read the basics, so I knew the background of all the major and many of the minor characters, but I still needed the companion book(Heroes & Monsters) to detail the thousands of references that I never even noticed. Book One follows the league's formation(Mina, from Dracula, Alan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines, Capt. Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dr. Jekyll/Edward Hyde, from Jekyll & Hyde, and Hawley Griffin from The Invisble Man) as they battled Fu Manchu and defeated a plot by the original "M"(Yes, M from James Bond fame). The second book threw them into a War of the Worlds storyline that found room for the Island of Dr. Moreau and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars. Awesome.

Alan Moore is notoriously distant from Hollywood, accepting money for the rights(which, to be fair, are usually sold by DC/Warner Bros. not him personally), but shunning any attempt to involve him in the production(he once said, of League, that if someone wanted to give him massive amounts of money for characters he kinda sorta didn't create, fine, but don't expect him to be involved). There was a bit of a scuffle around V for Vendetta, where Joel Silver claimed the script and movie were endorsed by Moore, and he was giving eager notes about how to improve the film. This was untrue, and the following controversy led Moore to sever all ties with DC, who had published his works since the early eighties. He went so far as to take his name off the film and give his entire royalty check to David Lloyd, the artist of the graphic novel.

V for Vendetta, his first attempt at a serialized, continuing story, wasn't the best thing he'd ever written, but was still a bit more layered and complex than the film. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, but i had to turn off my expectations and settle down to enjoy a high octane action film instead of a real in-depth political thriller. In the end, it's nice to see politics and some form of thought and opinion in an action movie. I'm leaving From Hell off this list because it's one of the few Moore works I haven't read. I enjoyed the movie, but I don't feel qualified to talk much about it since I don't know what the original was like.

Which brings me, finally, to Watchmen. Directed by Zack Snyder, who helmed the quite-good Dawn of the Dead remake, and, of course, 300, I'm not entirely ruling out the possibility it could be good. Alan Moore said of the last script he read that it was the best script you could get for Watchmen, but that it still wouldn't work as a movie. I have to agree, even though it's premature to judge a film that's still in production. Watchmen is a dense, sprawling mystery with a huge cast of characters and an epic scope. Putting aside the massive editing that would need to be done to fit this film into a 2 hour movie(filmed as written, this would be better fitted to a 13 episode HBO series), I still don't see it working. Watchmen is a comic book about comic books, and seems like it could only work as a comic book. Not only the superhero aspect, but the way it's written and the subject matter. Putting this into a movie wouldn't have the same effect. 

So I know this was long winded, and more of a blog post than a discussion starter, but I think everyone reading this group should check out his books(even the ones that haven't been turned into movies... yet). Also, any thoughts/opinions of the above mentioned movies or comics? I welcome any comments.

Re:Alan Moore Knows the Score

Re:Re:Alan Moore Knows the Score

Agreed. Alan Moore is completely in the right with his decisions regarding Hollywood. He makes allowances that maybe he's a bit reactionary and takes things a bit far, but I think more people need to take his stance.

Watchmen is a book I picked up in High School, and I read it once every year. In fact, I annually go through my collection and read all of my Alan Moore stuff(well, some of the stuff he did for Image isn't my cup of tea, and some of his single issue DC stuff lacks the scope of his larger stories). Snyder is most definitely a good choice for a comic adaptation, but, and I rarely say this, Watchmen is something I never really want to see adapted... ever. As I said, it's so perfectly fitted to the comic book world, the stereotypes, trappings and mythology of comic books, that it would be impossible to translate that to film. Putting aside the amount of information that would need to be crammed into a movies running time.

About V for Vendetta, my enjoyment of it was about the same as Minority Report. I was initially upset that Minority Report wasn't a paranoid thriller and meditation on free will with kickass action scenes, but was instead a collection of kickass action scenes with some small messages about free will. But then I realized that, for a mainstream blockbuster, the ideas it did get across were pretty unique. You don't get that from a Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Same for Vendetta; it toned down the political and social message of the comic(which, yes, was tons better), but still put more social commentary into an action film than most studio productions do. 

Hopefully those two successful movies will signal a change, and our action movies will become more intellectual, but still full of stuff blowing up real good. Case in point: our blockbusters are now being directed by people like Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinski, Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro(all, coincidentally, horror directors). Just a decade ago blockbusters were shiny, plastic, hollow creations by people like Roland Emerich and Dean Devlin(Godzilla, ID4). Despite the fact that I didn't think Pirates or Spiderman 3 succeeded creatively this last year, they were still full of more artistry, vision and style than blockbusters of the past decade. 

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