Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is every bit as faithful to its source material (Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-volume series about a 22-year-old go-nowhere man-boy fending off his new girlfriend's seven evil exes) as Zack Snyder's Watchmen was to his (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's brooding comic-hero deconstruction). Both treat the comic-book panels as storyboards, and the dialogue as road maps from which they seldom stray. But there is, ultimately, one significant difference: Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall's comic-book movie has soul.
For all of Scott Pilgrim's strict adherence to the comic—the stylized video-game imagery, the rock-and-roll and references, the self-conscious merging of chop-socky action and puppy-dog-sweet sentiment—it goes even deeper, conveying the ache pulsating between the lines in O'Malley's original, which was so simply drawn that it looks like the work of a child not even trying very hard.
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