UPDATE: The New York Times had a longish piece on Moore a coupla days ago.
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If you’ve been reading anything about the Wachowski Brothers’ film adaptation of the graphic novel V for Vendetta lately, you’ve probably noticed that lots of the articles and reviews just sort of drop in a casual reference to the fact that Alan Moore demanded his name be removed from the film, with no further explanation. It serves almost as little dig at the film, a goes-without-saying sign that the movie surely is V for Very Bad if its own creator wants nothing to do with it.
I had to go back almost a year to find, in a May 2005 story on Comic Book Resouces, a bit of an explanation for Moore’s actions. Some of it had to do with the Wachowskis’ film itself:
Alan gave some details about bits of the V For Vendetta shooting script he'd seen. "It was imbecilic; it had plot holes you couldn't have got away with in Whizzer And Chips in the nineteen sixties. Plot holes no one had noticed."
But mostly, Moore is just disenchanted with Hollywood in general, and who can blame him:
[T]he kindest thing that can be said about the films "From Hell," "Constantine" and "League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is that they're not as good as the comics.Alan's oft-repeated stance on this is that the original comics remain untouched. "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them, enough to keep them separate, take the option money, I could be assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naïve on my part."
This has changed. Speaking to me on Friday, Moore added to this sentiment, telling me "after the films came out, I began to feel increasingly uneasy, I have a dwindling respect for cinema as it is currently expressed."
There’s a lot more in the piece about Moore’s general moral objection to Hollywood. And while I applaud his principled stance, it may have been a bit shortsighted in the case of Vendetta -- I saw the film last night, and it is astonishing and very faithful to the spirit and the vision of the book, and fairly faithful to the letter. Sure, some aspects of the graphic novel have been condensed or updated to reflect the state of the world today, but you can’t adapt another medium for film and not make those kinds of changes.
If Moore is taking himself perhaps a tad too seriously, then it’s still the case, alas, that some people aren’t taking “comic book movies” seriously enough. If you take a look through just the headlines of some of the reviews listed at Google News, you see phrases including “very, very fun,” “awesome action flick,” and “a great escape.” I’d love to know what planet folks are living on in which a movie about a populace cowed by fear of terrorism and a government driven by fear of the governed is an “escape.”
My review will be up later at FlickFilosopher.com, but it’s safe to say it’ll be a big huge geeky rave.
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