10 Times Comic Book Movies Departed From The Canon And It Was Great

6. V For Vendetta - It's About The War On Terror Not Thatcher's Britain

Unlike Mignola, Millar or Gaiman, Alan Moore is unlikely to be amenable to films of his work. Getting him onto the subject of screen adaptations is sure to produce the most curmudgeonly dismissal of the whole business of film adaptation (accompanied with an avowal never to see the finished product). In fact, the anarchist occultist's increasing shift away from the mainstream and into works that are experimental, avant-garde and frequently pornographic could be seen as part of his stated desire to make comics that are essentially unfilmable. The thing is, though, that the very "unfilmable" nature of much of Moore's work means that the screen versions have had to change things in order to function and, taken on their own merits, many of the films based on Moore comics are actually pretty good. (Not League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though, there's no defence for that). When it came to V For Vendetta, Moore's 1980s story of the clash between an anarchist channeling Guy Fawkes and the fascist oppressions of the state, the writer was characteristically dismissive of the adaptation penned by The Matrix's Wachowski siblings. "The words, 'fascism' and 'anarchy,' occur nowhere in the film," he told MTV at the time, "It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country." It's that willingness to update the target of the story's political ire, however, that makes V For Vendetta work as a film. Moore was fueled by his disgust at the awfulness of Margaret Thatcher's government in Britain in the early 1980s, but that subtext would feel irrelevant to an audience in the mid-2000s. The movie would feel like a toothless period piece. It was vital that the Wachowski's made the political subtext of the movie fit with the political realities of the day, not with the debates and dichotomies of the past, and that's why they turned V For Vendetta into a story about contemporary attitudes to terrorism and government control and surveillance. The Guy Fawkes mask would never have become the symbol of hactivists in Anonymous or associated with the Occupy movement without that sense of contemporary relevance.