In the book, at the end of the day, everybody is just an overenthusiastic and screwed-up Fanboy. Even the guy with the impressive Back-Story turns out to have created this lie to live his dream.
To me that is far more interesting a message.
The comic was better becasue of the bleaker and more cynical nature of it.
Ex-cop takes crime fighting into his own hands? Nerd gets girl at the end? They seem like the most basic action movie cliches.
I liked how Millar turned the norms on its ear with his comic. It was atypical. I enjoyed the comic a lot more.
And only a nerd would turn his child into a super-hero. So the comic version make more sense.
I can't help but think some people take the comic (and by extension the film) too seriously. I understand the darker sense of humor and bleak ending to the book is a final, biting rebuke of superheroes in comics and in concept.
But just because it is intellectually viscous
does not make it good. The same themes, the same 'thesis,' if you will, is all preserved in the film. The narrative is lightened up because quite frankly, Millar missed the mark. He is so gleeful in being a smartass and trying to be the coolest guy on the block he restated his point at the end of the comic that he had made since the very first issue...the concept of superheroes are dumb and only geeks or deranged people would try it--and they would likely die.
But that point getting so mean spirited by the end wasn't enlightening, it was snarky and deflated the value of the comic into a fun, but deeply alienated read. Vaughn recognized this and lightened it up at the end and threw in some twists of his own. Is it more cliché driven at the end? Yes. And so are superheroes in concept and execution in all mediums. He can still have his critique of the genre, but have his film be entertaining and deeply likable as opposed to pretentiously stiff, as the last third of the comic is.
One can make claims of intellectual superiority of the book, but no one really likes it all that much. The film has a ton of fans because, like Speilberg on Jaws, he improved the story so much more by simplifying the narrative and making it audience-friendly. That is not always a bad thing as Speilberg showed by making a masterpiece out of a flawed summer page-turner. Vaughn made a soon-to-be cult classic out of a too-sarcastic-for-its-own-good comic book.
