I wasn't really planning on seeing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Mostly because I wasn't sure they could do the comic justice. The New York Times has an excellent article by Douglas Wold titled The Comic Book 'League' Was Better that talks about some of what was wrong in the film adaptation of it.
You would think it would be easy to turn a comic book into a movie, which is what the director Stephen Norrington and the screenwriter James Dale Robinson have tried to do with "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." All you have to do, after all, is to translate it from one visual medium into another; the comic book already looks like a storyboard. Of course, it's nowhere near that simple, and the filmmakers behind "League" have failed to recognize what makes a good comic book tick in the first place.
Alan Moore, author of the mock Victorian adventure tale on which the movie is based, is the most acclaimed writer currently working in mainstream comics, and much of his work seems, on the face of it, as if it could be made into spectacular cinema. He writes ingenious, psychologically resonant stories, full of breathtaking images and set pieces, and his famously detailed scripts "direct" his artist-collaborators in everything from the "camera angle" of each panel to the minutiae of the characters' facial expressions.
But that's actually a problem when it comes to filming his work. "Watchmen," written by Mr. Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, continues to be one of the best-selling graphic novels more than 15 years after its publication, but it has been notoriously resistant to attempts to adapt it into a workable screenplay: its narrative about aging superheroes and nuclear panic is so deeply rooted in the comics form that it could no more be filmed than, say, "Citizen Kane" could be adapted into a novel. "From Hell," Mr. Moore and Eddie Campbell's terrifying dissection of Jack the Ripper's world and world view, was turned into a successful movie by the Hughes brothers a few years ago, but only by discarding most of its plot and structural framework, and recasting it as a straightforward thriller. [New York Times]
This just reinforces my belief that there are some texts that just don't cross well between mediums. Some books just can't really be made into a movie that preserves all its elements. And some movies can't really be adapted in a way that really does the visual impact of the movie justice. So often I wish that someone would adapt a book as a series on HBO or Showtime. So that they could take the time to tell the story more fully.
This also made me think of an article I read ages back by Terry Rossio on adapting The Puppet Masters into a movie. It's a great look into how Hollywood thinks.
