Here's some bits from the review Patrick mentions....
He’s written the first comic book screenplay to treat its source material as literature, and he’s crafted this with all the care and complexity of end-of-the-year Oscar bait....
This isn’t just great film writing; it’s the very model for how to adapt something and preserve it intact while still making the hard choices that anyone faces when translating something from one media to another....
Moore’s story is remarkably elegant, and Hayter has been very careful not to upset the way Moore constructed it in the first place. Dialogue, descriptions, even camera angles seem to be carefully transcribed. There is essentially no invention here. I can count the number of things that Hayter has created for this script on one hand....
So many of the things I was afraid would be gone are still here, and somehow, Hayter makes this thing actually feel leisurely. My favorite chapter from the original is Chapter IV, which deals with Dr. Manhattan’s self-imposed exile to Mars, where he finds himself adrift in time, buffeted by memory like a storm, and I was sure that this would be short-changed in the film. Instead, it’s preserved intact, and it’s just as haunting and poetic and sad....
Do they really do it? Do they still do what they did in the book? Do they still do that to New York? Yes and no... He didn’t tone down the idea... just the stink and the stacks of bodies. He doesn’t rub our nose in something that would be unbearable. Instead, he’s found an elegant way to handle it.
All right, I'm excited now...
(excerpted from http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=13607) |
