Watching the Watchmen
Reading through the previous week’s accumulated email this morning, I came across a message from my friend Josh bringing tidings of a Watchmen movie in the works. If this is true, and the filmmakers don’t utterly screw it up, this is exciting news indeed!
In my opinion, anyone who thinks the medium of comics is fundamentally immature or incapable of rising to the level of “literature” should give Watchmen, or, for that matter, a whole lot of other stuff by its author—British comics genius Alan Moore—a read.
Moore, whose gifts are so great that DC Comics editors reportedly “scoured” his office for scraps of paper containing his ideas after he split from the company in 1989, was among the first to really push the boundaries of genre comics. Watchmen, which is widely considered his magnum opus (except by me—I would give that honor to From Hell) is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the superhero genre and, by way of a clever story-within-a-story, the comics medium itself. It’s one of those thrilling pieces of art that make you giddy just to contemplate the profusion of ideas that seem to be flowing effortlessly from the author’s mind.
So far the movies based on Moore’s books have been a mixed bag. From Hell departed fairly significantly from its source—although, to be fair, it would have had to due to the book’s length, and I think the filmmakers still captured the essential spirit of the original. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, on the other hand, absolutely bears the indignity of having been “messed with” by Hollywood. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing it, admittedly, but the casting of Sean Connery (who is not nearly haggard enough to play Moore’s Allan Quartermain), the addition of an American-pandering Tom Sawyer character, the Vin Diesel-esque “LXG” acronym used in advertising, and a round of terrible reviews were enough to render it DOA for me.
Hopefully the people in charge of making Watchmen will take their cues from Peter Jackson and approach the material very carefully and respectfully (I can already think of certain aspects of the story—such as the Tales of the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic—that will be difficult to adapt to screen). Moore fans can forgive the mangling of “LXG,” which is still a relatively minor work in the Moore canon, but marring the legacy of Watchmen with a botched movie would be a real tragedy.