I pretty much agree with everything you've said. I had a few quibbles here and there - in some places, it felt like they just couldn't resist the urge to do "the big movie thing" when a subtler or more understated technique would not merely have worked as well, but better...but for the most part, very minor points, and I was very pleased with how they chose to do a great many things.
The one exception was parts of the ending (I'll save details for private email to keep this spoiler-light), which I felt would have had a lot more oomph had it been done in a manner more like the original...and which I felt could have been tweaked to be better even within the basic structure of how they did it. This blindsided me, because I'd gotten through 98% of the movie without any reactions like that, so I felt a bit let down by the ending...but on the whole, I was happy with the movie.
(Though I could see how diehard fanatics of the original might well hate it. :)
IMO, that's taking it a bit too far, losing some of the intimidating power of the character.
Likewise. (It is symmetrical - the original had a very absolutist resistance (V) to a sometimes-disturbingly humanized set of antagonists; the movie flips which is more elemental and which is easier to identify with. But I think it's more interesting in the original configuration.)
One of the people I saw it with wasn't familiar with the graphic novel; she enjoyed the movie - she went in expecting a reasonable-caliber action flick and instead found herself watching a reasonable-caliber political/philosophical movie with some action sequences. (The more action-y of which both she and I felt were very cool, but in the wrong movie entirely. :)
[original graphic novel]
The original graphic novel really stands athwart the line back when 'graphic novels' were splitting off from 'comics' - or at least, that's how it came across to me; the conventions used in it felt like something halfway along the evolution from one to the other. I like it a lot, but sometimes those older narrative conventions threw me a bit.
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Date: 2006-03-19 07:36 am (UTC)The one exception was parts of the ending (I'll save details for private email to keep this spoiler-light), which I felt would have had a lot more oomph had it been done in a manner more like the original...and which I felt could have been tweaked to be better even within the basic structure of how they did it. This blindsided me, because I'd gotten through 98% of the movie without any reactions like that, so I felt a bit let down by the ending...but on the whole, I was happy with the movie.
(Though I could see how diehard fanatics of the original might well hate it. :)
IMO, that's taking it a bit too far, losing some of the intimidating power of the character.
Likewise. (It is symmetrical - the original had a very absolutist resistance (V) to a sometimes-disturbingly humanized set of antagonists; the movie flips which is more elemental and which is easier to identify with. But I think it's more interesting in the original configuration.)
One of the people I saw it with wasn't familiar with the graphic novel; she enjoyed the movie - she went in expecting a reasonable-caliber action flick and instead found herself watching a reasonable-caliber political/philosophical movie with some action sequences. (The more action-y of which both she and I felt were very cool, but in the wrong movie entirely. :)
[original graphic novel]
The original graphic novel really stands athwart the line back when 'graphic novels' were splitting off from 'comics' - or at least, that's how it came across to me; the conventions used in it felt like something halfway along the evolution from one to the other. I like it a lot, but sometimes those older narrative conventions threw me a bit.