I honestly had never heard of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World before last week. I saw musings of it at previous movies I had watched and around the net in a few places, but the moment I saw Michael Cera on it, I passed it off as another teen flick with little interest to me.

Turns out it was based on six graphic novels between 2004 and this year by a guy in Canada. I’m a fair man, I try to give things a shot, and I spend a half-day going through all six volumes.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. Its plot is a bit thin, and there is a lot going on in some scenes that I felt the author could have simplified so that I didn’t have to re-read it a few times to get it (this may also be because the reader I was using was jumping around pages in the copy I downloaded, and yes I downloaded it, wah, cry moar.) but the basic premise and story were pretty good and I felt it was a solid piece of comic material.

However I am still on the fence about spending money at the theaters to watch what I largely construct to be Michael Cera being… well… Michael Cera in a film that much like Star Trek, tries too hard to fold “normal people” into the may geek subcultures that the movie is intended for, and subsequently, make fun of those of us who engage in them.

This kinda related to my last post, I’m just now getting to expanding this. Also, full disclosure, I have not seen the film yet, so don’t interpret this based on me seeing it yet. I’ll tell you if this is different when I do.

The problem I have with Hollywood today is that when they latch on to the next greatest fad, they won’t let go. Ever since X-Men netted millions of dollars, comic books ranging from God-tier to Shit-tier have been made into movies, as well as adaptations of video games, and other subcultures. In what is largely a reversal of 10-15 years ago, being a geek, be it computer, video games, music, movies, or whatever, is now seen as culturally cool to everyone else. You may think this is a good thing for us geeks, but it isn’t.

It isn’t cool because you can’t simply just interject random geek elements into a story or event and expect everyone to accept it. The fact that everytime Scott Pilgrim beats an evil ex, he bursts into coins, it’s a play on video games and how defeating the boss nets you some sort of reward, or in one instance, an extra life. Almost all gamers can relate of course, because coins and extra lives have been a staple of video games since the NES days. But switching from a subtle storytelling style of drama and conflict to HOLY SHIT RANDOM EPIC FIGHT with COINS KEKEKEKE just makes it plain silly, which is fine, it’s funny, and it works in graphic novels because the reader absorbs it at his/her own pace, and it makes sense to them. In film however, your task is to tell a story in a short period of time by film standards, and when adapting books into screenplays and film, the first thing to get the chopping block is probably length of events. To geeks, the subculture they absorb and are a part of defines who they are, they identify with the material, they bond to it, because for many, like me, we use it as an alternate form of imagination, a way to envision our lives in a different scope, or simply align with the main character of the story and see it from their perspective. That’s what makes books and visual media so entertaining to people, is its ability to take us into the world that it lays out and make us experience what it does.

The big draw I think here comes from adapting visual novels into film. With written books, since they are books of just words, usually the reader is left to imagine the story in their head and make the characters, plot, and setting form around what they perceive it to be. Filmmakers try to capture this by writing a screenplay and casting actors they think best represent the original material while adapting it for a wide range of audiences. Often however, this comes at the expense of making the film come off from a few people’s points of view, and many viewers who had a different idea of how the book played out in their head, will leave the theater saying “The books were better than the movie”. After all, everyone has their own opinion. Graphic novels however, both tell the story, and visualize it at the same time. Now you are not only reading the story, but you are seeing how the characters look, the setting they interact in, and the actions and reactions they perform throughout the duration of the books. So not only do you have a picture of what you think everything was about in your mind, but you are also seeing what the original author intended it to be right from the very start. So when you see the film, instead of saying the book was better than the film, you might say something like “Well that character totally wasn’t like that in the book!” or “They totally got that scene wrong compared to the comic!” and so on. That is what has made the comic book to film transition the most tricky, how to you take visuals from one medium, and duplicate them onto another medium, while preserving the original intent of the author, and the imagination of the reader? That is what has me on the fence about watching this movie, because I feel that I will walk out saying that Michael Cera doesn’t play a particularly convincing Scott Pilgrim, because Michael Cera is Michael Cera. Of course many teen actors today probably have roots in geek subculture, but geek subculture is not the same for today’s crowd as it was for the 20’s and 30’s something people that truly understand the subculture, and probably might question this film.

All in all, I like how the walls continue to fall around geek and nerd culture, and how more accepting it is to be someone who enjoys these things, but too much of something to the mainstream only kills it for the rest of us. I don’t want this graphic novel to film success to usher in a new era of making the internet’s most popular comics into films, because if you give that lazy fuck Fred Gallagher a chance to sell his terrible fan-fiction of himself to the big screen, I might just puke my liver out somehow. I will however accept a film version of Girl Genius.

I also think that in the long run, books like Scott Pilgrim should be made into adaptations for TV rather than film. A mini-series or even full series that either retells the books or plays off of them would be much more enjoyable to watch rather than a single movie with potentially terrible sequel ideas. The Guild sadly is an example of this, except it’s gone from being a humble parody of WoW players to a full-force HAHA ISN’T IT GREAT TO BE A GODDAMN NERD GUYZ?

Think “Old Anonymous vs. New Anonymous”