Classic Bond Forum

I read Watchmen again recently. Looking forward to LXG: The Black Dossier next year.

Are you looking forward to Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie?

Alan Moore has said that his work is unfilmable and I tend to agree with him.

James wrote:Alan Moore has said that his work is unfilmable and I tend to agree with him.

Well, the screenwriter has said he's going to be very faithful, even including the Tales of the Black Freighter stuff, which I'd have thought would be the first thing to go in any movie adaptation. Dunno if Snyder will use the same greenscreen technique he used for 300. That was probably the best way to capture the look of Frank Miller's very stylised artwork, but I'm not sure it would work so well for Watchmen, which was drawn in a much more photo-realistic style.

If you take The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel for example, a faithful film version would have to have a budget of $300 million, be ten hours long, an 18 certificate and directed by a 'proper' director like David Lynch for example. Unsuprisingly, they didn't do these things with the LXG film and it was just a watered down Hollywood action film with an American character shoehorned in and Captain Nemo having martial arts fights. Terry Gilliam planned to make Watchmen for years but said it was impossible because there would never be enough money to do it any sort of justice. Plus Watchmen should be a mini-series if anything. Having said that I'll still keep an eye on the film. I like Zack Snyder's direction in Dawn Of The Dead but not the film. If that makes any sense.

James wrote:If you take The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel for example, a faithful film version would have to have a budget of $300 million, be ten hours long, an 18 certificate and directed by a 'proper' director like David Lynch for example.

Not sure about the "10 hours long" bit. I think they'd actually have to expand it a bit to actually get enough material for a feature film. The LXG film wasn't as bad as I had expected, but that's only because my expectations were so low. The stinking reviews it got had me expecting another Batman and Robin when I finally watched it on TV, but I actually found it an OK way to spend a couple of hours. I thought it was better than the From Hell movie, which was just a bog-standard Jack the Ripper movie with none of the discursions on Freemasonry and mysticism that made Moore and Campbell's graphic novel so different from other books on the subject. I'm convinced the producers only bought the rights so they could use the title for their Ripper movie.

There was a lot of stuff in the LXG graphic novel (volume 1) that they declined to put in the film. Quatermein as an emaciated opium addict rescued by Nemo and Mina Harker, the undercover ruse in the girl's school to flush out the invisible man, Fu Manchu, the giant Limehouse battle, flashback scenes involving Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty etc, etc. Some of this was unused because it was too downbeat or risque and some because of copyright reasons. But mostly it was unused because they decided to ignore the graphic novel and make up their own story. The film deviated far more than I expected and I did expect it to deviate. Alan Moore was especially cheesed off by the LXG film because it was vastly different from his original book. I quite liked the From Hell film although I haven't read the graphic novel. V for Vendetta is probably the most solid adaption of an Alan Moore book so far.

I read Watchmen again recently. Looking forward to LXG: The Black Dossier next year.

Sadly this has been delayed several times but I have a feeling it will be well worth the wait.

James wrote:But mostly it was unused because they decided to ignore the graphic novel and make up their own story.

Well, the way I look at it is that the graphic novel was one story featuring those characters and the film was another, just as the Superman, Batman, Spiderman movies etc. were not directly based on stories from the comics, but reworked elements from the comics into original stories.