REVIEW: The Mindscape of Alan Moore

Swank-mo-tron and Dr. Cyborg sat down to take a look at The Mindscape of Alan Moore (which we’re holding a contest to give away two copies of, details here). Here’s what they had to say:

Dr. Cyborg, Robot MD: I enjoyed watching this. I don’t think that you necessarily need to be an Alan Moore fan, or even a comic book fan to like this, but it would sure help. I don’t know if I would go as far as saying that I felt out his mindscape by watching it either, but he had some really interesting things to say.

The subjects I felt were the most interesting where when he was talking about space/time, and how apocalypse could be caused by a pulse of information. As far as comic books go there was a sort of reenactment of Watchmen, performed by Alan Moore, that was really cool.

It made me want to read Watchmen as soon as the film was over.

On a side note, it is annoying to me that Alan Moore can say something that sounds obscure at best, then explain it, and make more then what I consider perfect sense out of it. For example calling him self a magician, the first thing I do when someone says there a magician is call out “Bullshit!” but after he explained it, I can safely say, “That mother fucker be a master magician.”

If I had to summarize this documentary in one word it would be “Mindfuck!” –Slugtron

Swank-mo-tron: I, too, enjoyed this documentary despite a few of it’s weaknesses (which I can talk a little bit about in a minute) but this was an interesting window into the thought process of Alan Moore.  I expected him to be quite pretentious, but he’s not at all.  He’s just simply smarter than all of us.  It’s true.  And I hope he writes comics forever.

One of the great highlights is Moore himself doing readings from Rorschachs journal.

The film digs deeper into Alan Moore than I’ve ever seen, but that being said, it still felt as though we’ve only scratched the surface of Alan Moore.  I’d love to see someone like Errol Morris interview him…  I’d love to have seen him talk about his falling out with DC and more about his problems with movies made from his books.  (He did talk briefly about his conversation with Terry Gilliam about why Watchmen was unfilmable, though, which was good.)

And the only other big problem with the film, though, was the preposterous use of B-roll that didn’t match the context of what was being said.  It was so distracting sometimes that I had to look away in order to pay attention to what Moore was saying.  It was odd, to be sure.

Though, this is a great movie for anyone who’s as big a fan of Alan Moore’s as I am…