Having seen and reviewed the latest 'best comic book ever' adaptation, I thought I'd take a look back at a recent comic book adaptation which is a classic (if you can get over the irritating Americanised version of Britain).
This clip contains the final few scenes of V for Vendetta, in which V has managed to mobilise the largely sheeplike population of a near-future totalitarian Britain to march on Parliament. Although V is about to commit an act of grand terrorism, the film is all about collective action and revolution.
The symbolism of the last few minutes is astonishing. The population of Britain march en masse on Parliament, the costumes and masks hiding individual identities as they stroll past armed soldiers - witness the power of ordinary people acting together. As the 1812 Overture plays, parliament is destroyed and the people of Britain one by one remove their costumes and regain their identities - through collective action freedom and liberty are restored.
Now ask yourself, what was the point of Watchmen?
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I agree that this is a much tighter film than the Watchmen. It seems to me that the point of the Watchmen was to demonstrate how FX have evolved such that anything that can be imagined can be visualised on screen and therefore the 'unfilmable' is now filmable. Plus, the film company must've been fairly sure that they would make a bunch of money from it.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, compressing the full story and characterisations into a two and a half hour film has been shown to be very big ask. Maybe there will be a director's cut extended version that improves things but that would just demonstrate the opportunity missed by the original film.