When hero and screen collide

While the superhero genre may have come of age back with the first X-men film, last year’s The Dark Knight and Iron Man have clearly shown that the comic book films being released nowadays are amongst the most serious and respectful interpretations the genre has ever seen.

Currently there are at least 20 films either in production, or on the drawing board, based on comics. This unprecedented growth in recent times would seem to indicate that the future is bright for the genre. But has Hollywood really fallen in love with superheroes, or is this just a passing infatuation?

The up-and-coming Watchmen film is something that has been talked about for a long time. To many it is the end-all of comic books, and after many years, and some legal disputes, it has fallen to Zack Snyder.

The man behind the film adaptation of 300 is to bring what has been dubbed the ‘Citizen Kane of the printed page’ to the silver screen and, importantly, to a new audience.

It will be interesting to see if Snyder’s version will have the same impact on the superhero film genre that Alan Moore’s original work had on the printed medium.

If it is to truly emulate its source material, and not simply be an action flick borrowing elements from Moore’s work, then Snyder’s Watchmen will have to achieve the same examination of superheroes as they’re portrayed in the movies, as Moore’s work did when it came to looking at how they’d been written and drawn in comics up until 1985.

Up until now the majority of comic book film success has come via superheroes. The problem here is that even among those who have no interest in comics, the notion of what exactly a superhero is has been pre-engrained into their mindsets.

No one needs to pick up a comic to recognise Superman, Batman, The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man. They are cultural icons: truth, justice and all that stuff, and are so well known that the pubic are going to check out their latest film regardless of how dire it might be.

This has been their greatest strength, and why their contemporaries have failed to emulate this success. Why the audience seems to have little interest in lesser known superheroes perhaps lies in the fact that when it comes to the icons, the audience already knows the character, their beginnings, and what drives them.

The most successful superhero films have been those that have moved away from the ‘origin story,’ treating their source material as a jumping-off point.

The re-emergence of Batman on the big screen, owes as much to Christopher Nolan’s re-imagining of the character as it does on the audiences pre-existing knowledge of the caped crusader.

His work was not just a simple reiterating of public knowledge, as was the case with the latest Superman film, but a reboot in the vein of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Miller’s work re-launched the Batman comic; Nolan’s retooling of the Batman mythos re-launched the film franchise.

Despite The Dark Knight lifting some long held perceptions of the superhero genre, the fact remains that those films which have not been based on well known superheroes have by and large failed. It seems for a superhero film to be a success it shouldn’t come with any required reading attached.

There is the danger, of course, that when you adapt any form of literature, you run the risk of watering down the source material so much that you lose the very essence that made it worthwhile in the first place.

For books and plays there is space for interpretation because the act of reading is fundamentally imaginative. With comics, all aspects of the story are already pre-defined, without the same kind of personal interpretation afforded by the non-graphic novel.

Dubbed “unfilmable” by Terry Gilliam, who first attempted to adapt it to film, a direct adaptation of Watchmen could be a very dangerous endeavour. Like much of Moore’s work there is much more to Watchmen than just its story. There are so many elements of it that are unique to its original form: the overlap of words, pictures, and supplemental material to tell a story that encompass the past, present, and future of events in the story. It seems inevitable that much of this material will have to be streamlined, or discarded, for Watchmen to work as a film.

This has been the case for other adaptations of Moore’s work. While V for Vendetta may have been action- packed, it was never intended to be an action film and yet, when it was adapted for film it was sandboxed into this genre.

Its comparisons of anarchy and fascism were boiled down to a simplistic idea: that liberty and freedom will always triumph over tyranny.

The overarching theme of Watchmen is darkness. Much of what it looks at is the notion of what is acceptable behaviour in a world of masked individuals.

When Moore’s characters go to war, they don’t mess around. They don’t just arrest people, they brutalise them.

With Batman there is the sense of implied horror, that he is always close to crossing the line, but with his Watchmen equivalent, Rorschach, there is no such impression – only an image of a broken man who’s lost himself to the violence he inflicts upon the world.

Before Hollywood and Angelina Jolie, Wanted was a comic that would have pushed the boundaries of even the most hardcore film goer. While it is understandable that its makers would shy away from much of the source material, what remains in the film bares little resemblance to what was intended as a satirical look at mainstream superhero comics.

Reduced to the quintessential action film, would the film really have had the same success – $300 million worldwide – if it had lacked the star power of Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman?

What about The Dark Knight? How much of its success is owed to the hype surrounding Heath Ledger’s death?

This is why Watchmen is so important. How the audience reacts to its release will be pivotal to the future of superhero films.

This is a high budget comic movie that isn’t packed with known superheroes or A-list celebrity talent. It is a superhero film unlike any other, and one that is sticking as close to its source material as no other has.

If Watchmen is to fail then there isn’t much else left in print that could move the superhero genre forward. But if it succeeds then it will contribute to the growing stable of comic book adaptations that will hopefully show Hollywood and the public that there is so much more to the genre then just men in tights.