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As V for Vendetta gets seditious at your local cinema, it's worth remembering that before 1979, the year of Superman, big-budget releases adapted from comic-strips were rarities. Not any more. Last year a dozen such movies were released, not to mention any number of films that look as though they've been adapted from the funny pages.
Comic books - or graphic novels as we must call them now - largely consist of pictures with speech-bubbles, so you would think the page-to-screen transition would be simple. But no; one of the more amusing by-products of the genre is the giant hissy fit thrown by legions of fanboys when studios elect to dress X-Men's Wolverine in black leather instead of blue and yellow spandex, or when Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, gets bitten by a genetically altered arachnid instead of a radioactive one.
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It started with Superman - now every last caped crusader gets a look-in, says anne billson |
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Here, the studios have come unstuck in their attempts to film the dense, scholarly and very English work of Alan Moore, one of the bona fide graphic novel geniuses. From Hell was a brave stab at abridging his mighty Jack the Ripper dissertation, but The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which added an anachronistic Tom Sawyer to Moore's original line-up of such Victorian superheroes as Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo) was just dumbed down.
Now V for Vendetta has shifted its story of freedom fighters in a totalitarian Britain from the heyday of Thatcherism, when it was conceived, into an all-purpose generic future. Needless to say, Moore has disowned the movie, but boy, did the film-makers miss a trick. What would you have given to have seen it set right now, in the era of Tony Blair? 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 16, 2006
Film Three View: V for Vendetta
Last week: automotive carnage
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