Not-so-comic movie

I realized that I haven't yet called upon my personal area of expertise in any of my "cultural" postings, so it's time to break out the comic book commentary.

Specifically, the comic book "Wanted" that is being made into a movie due out this month. The six-issue mini-series was published in 2003 and 2004 and got a lot of press because of the rumor that it was being made into a film starring Eminem and Halle Berry. This wouldn't be hard to float, because if you look at the highly detailed art of JG Jones in this book, two of the lead characters are spitting images of those same thespians. This rumor, while false, generated a lot of heat on the book and got people to notice it where it might otherwise have sold to a much lesser extent.



The book focuses on a 9-5 white collar man who is bored with his life and content to live out a meaningless existence when he is jilted into reality, in Matrix-esque fashion, when he is told that his father was a highly respected super-villain who was only recently killed. This lead character comes to find out that the entire planet is under control of a super-villain society, and has been for some time, ever since they defeated the world's super heroes decades ago and promptly performed a lobotomy on civilization to make them forget that the super heroes ever existed.

What makes the book so different is just its mood... no matter how many times I've seen the scenarios played out in TV or the movies, the book makes you shudder at how callously human life is regarded. The human populace is depicted by the villains as nothing more than cattle to either be shepherded or slaughtered, depending on your mood.

While reading this book, I thought to myself that there was just no way this could ever be accurately translated to the screen. The language is just off the charts, of course, but we've seen (heard) that before. The part that really got to me was that I genuinely felt that this book was just TOO dark of a movie to make... that it would have to be radically changed if it was to be allowed on the screen.

I'll have to wait until I see the movie to really compare them, obviously, but I think what I'm trying to say was summed up nicely by this article on Filmwad: "As great as certain parts of the Wanted graphic novel were, one has to look at this with some serious skepticism: the comic is sadistic, mean-spirited, and arrogant, and the ending basically insults you for buying the comic in the first place. That may work really well within comics, but if the movie is even remotely similar to the source material (in which case James McAvoy would have to rape and kill almost every woman he meets), we'll hear some serious complaints from both the right and left sides of the political spectrum."

This is the trailer for the upcoming movie. Taken on its own, it looks like a fun summer movie. Viewed after reading the book, it just looks ridiculous. Mark Millar's book Wanted was in parts so loathsome, it offended me. The idea that they would try and change the book's core concepts and values, though, and still use the same name on it, offends me even more.

Change the setting, change the order of events, change the plot, even! But don't change the foundational doctrine of the source material. Even if it is deeply disturbing. Because then all you're doing is selling out.