In the latter case, the director becomes accountable for his judgment. Sometimes, he adds a redeeming quality that was not present in the original work – take for example, Blade Runner, in which Ridley Scott reduces the subtle plot of a great novel to a one-dimensional chase, but sets it in an atmospheric and visionary future that has certainly earned the film canonicity. Or, for that matter, Minority Report, in which Steven Spielberg takes a clever sketch by the same author and fleshes it into a longer mystery with deeper characters and a new set of futuristic technologies. But this road also has its failures – I consider the the Wachowski Brothers’ V for Vendetta to be a significant example. The original work starts off undifferentiated, as a blank totalitarian thriller without much independent merit. The story of a lone freedom fighter resisting a corrupt government is an old one. But as the work develops, author Alan Moore detaches from historical specifics and tenderly cultivates his characters. The result is a well-paced and thoughtful drama that allows personality to motivate history. (Moore’s dictator dies, for instance, not in a climactic showdown with a revolutionary, but at the hand’s of a functionary’s ambitious and frustrated wife.) The adaptation eschews Moore’s approach and dives into historical cliché, conflating post-9/11 America and Nazi Germany and relying on familiar conspiracy theories for drama. It replaces moments of intimacy with out-of-place Hollywood revelations. Obviously, such a concise format leaves no room for Moore’s careful pacing. But there is a gaping hole in the film where Moore’s originality should have been, and the Wachowski Brothers cannot provide enough explosions and stabbings to distract the original work’s readers.

Hopefully these comparative valuations appear to be more than simple fanboyism. If not, I suppose I should just see the movie first.