"Wanted," and the right way to do a graphic novel adaptation

A little while ago, I wrote an article on the Watchmen adaptation, and how odd it was that we'd happily accept people taking liberties with superheroes, but how self-contained graphic novels must be 100% faithful to its source material or we all get pissed.

Well, I saw Wanted this weekend, and it managed to strike a happy medium that I think works for graphic novels, if they must be adapted.

See, the thing about graphic novels is, the best of them don't need to be adapted, and typically shouldn't. Wanted, like Watchmen, derives a lot of its power from the medium of comics itself. Taking place in a world where the supervillains managed to kill all the superheroes, the original graphic novel feeds off the comic fan's detailed knowledge of superhero mythology to put your typical coming-of-age story in a greater comics context. One character cherishes the cape of a defeated Superman. Another kills Batman and Robin, who have since been brainwashed and forgotten who they are. Another stands on the side of a building, using boots he stole from Spider-Man. The entire graphic novel is deeply saturated in the world of comics, and that's the exact sort of thing that would seem either cheesy or forced on the big screen. The comic references can and should stay within comics. 

This is why Wanted, the movie, works. It takes the over-the-top violence and whimsical tone of the series, the general plot, and the basic characters and translates them to a more screen-friendly context. Instead of using the language of comics, we get the language of film: bullet time is used and parodied with the bullet-curving, and music and CG are made incredibly ironic and over-the-top. In the same way the graphic novel relies on the comic fan's knowledge of the medium, the film version perverts and messes with those film-specific tools that we all know and love.

Complaints can be made about the really obvious twists, or the underwhelming characterization, or even the fact that the "league of supervillains" schtick is switched out with "an academy of benevolent assassins," but you just can't bitch about the movie being unfaithful to its source material – simply because it had to be. We might watch it and wish that all the comic references were there, but, honestly, they just wouldn't work as well in film, just in the same way that you can't efficiently get "Ave Maria" or bullet time into comics.

I dunno what this says for Watchmen, of course. I can't think of too many ways you could change things around with that story and still keep it fun, because it's a much more plot and character-based piece than Wanted, which is all spectacle. Still, I think this philosophy is a pretty decent one to stand by where many graphic novels are concerned: we're looking for references and aesthetics when we talk about being "faithful" to the material, but the only stuff that really matters is the spirit, the themes, the basic plot, and making the film work on a cinematic level. As much as we'd like to try to turn comics into movies (remember how repetitive Sin City was at times?), they're often just better when we respect the different strengths of each medium.

That, or, you know, just don't make the movies at all.