Khaled
asked
Alan Moore:
I know that you did not like the movie adaptations of your books, but do you feel that Watchmen was closer to what you wanted or is it at the same level as L.O.E.G. and From Hell?
Alan Moore
I not only did not approve of the attempts to adapt my work to a medium for which it was never intended, I have never seen any of these movies and hold them all in pretty much equal disregard. I would say that the Watchmen movie seemed to me particularly misguided, in that the only thing of any importance about Watchmen was its display of new storytelling techniques and potentials that were designed to be unique to the comic medium and almost impossible to any other. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to reinvigorate a tired superhero genre. Quite the reverse: as with the previous Marvelman it was a critique of superheroes, and a meditation upon how these figures would look if they were disastrously transplanted to a realistically-depicted and above all adult world for which they’d never been designed. The opening page of Watchmen, with its impossibly long pull-back from a detail in a gutter to a position high above the street, was an up-front agenda-setting demonstration of something that could not be replicated in either literature or film, which is why I made it the book’s opening scene, and why I imagine the movie version apparently elected to leave it out.
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