Absolutely brilliant

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

One can say that a movie has a different impact on every person, and I agree with that, and i do realize that this is not a very well-made documentary per se, but it caused a major impact on me, very much because i wasn't expecting such a tremendous amount of information when i first thought about watching it.I was, in fact expecting to see some kind of biography and a scratch on the surface on Moore's most popular comic books, and that documentary really have these features, but eventually it becomes a rare piece of modern philosophy and a way to relate with the world that at least for me was entirely fresh and new. A view on the subject of magic that totally made sense to me, and a reflection on our day and age that is realistically terrifying.Yes, you'll watch a 80-minute monologue by Alan Moore, but I highly recommend it, because if you pay attention, this can be a very enriching experience after all.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore can hardly be called a documentary. It's just what the title says - the mind-scape of a brilliant, unique but also pretentious writer. The film is Alan Moore himself talking constantly for 80 minutes, apparently with no real editing or direction. It starts pretty conservatively with Moore talking about his early life, about how he discovered comics and how he got into the business, as well as some insight about his most important works - Watchmen, V For Vendetta, Swamp Thing, From Hell and Lost Girls, and those segments hold a lot of interest for fans. But from there, in the second half, Moore derails into long philosophical and quasi-spiritual ramblings that give some interesting insight into his mind and creativity, but really drag on for too long and show very little original thought that hasn't been expressed before by philosophers, spiritualists and physicists. As a whole this is less a documentary and more a chance for Moore to talk about whatever he wants; the visuals aren't interesting enough to make it any more engaging. It holds some interests for fans of Moore but keep your expectations low.

Let it be known, this will probably take more than one viewing to really all sink in. But, as with the majority of Alan Moore's best work (Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Killing Joke, LXG) you'll want to revisit it since it is, for lack of a better expression, consciousness-expanding. The documentary here focuses half-and-half in measure. Half the time it's on Moore's early life growing up in real working-class conditions in Northampton (i.e. didn't know what middle-class even was till he was in his teens), and then his odd-jobs that he had to get due to his horrible education reputation, leading up to his career in comics. The other half focuses at first on Moore's dealings in "Magic", which he says can actually be attributable to anything in terms of artistic creation, going back thousands of years, and on consciousness and understanding the world we live in and how we're apart of it, not to mention Gods and worship and even the nature of apocalypse and what "world" even means.It's deep stuff the director is dealing with, and he accompanies Moore's words and monologues (he's the only one on camera so there's nobody to say anything different, adulatory or contradictory or otherwise) with shots and scenes of the working-class conditions Moore grew up in, 'dramatic' recreations of some bits from Watchmen and V For Vendetta (frankly, the films, despite what Moore would tell you, do it better), and just random shots of people walking around and psychedelic things like fractals and mind-bending *extreme* close-up cinematography. It's all very pleasant to look at, though it's Moore who commands the attention from the director, with his very shaggy beard and long hair and eerie rings on every finger making him on the surface to look like he lives in a dark castle eating twigs and berries. In reality, he's probably one of the smartest, or at least most engaging people, you'll come across.Even when one doesn't fully get sucked into what Moore is talking about, it's never less than fascinating. It's about us. What we think and feel. The points he raises about religion- polytheism and the nature of spirituality in the modern world and the dangers of monotheism- are one thing that marks up some awesome food-for-thought. But then there's questions Moore raises about human beings in relation to themselves, self-consciousness, and how some decide to not even acknowledge it or even obliterate it. Furthermore into the realm of physics and time itself. It is quite a lot to take in, especially when one considers that for the first half of the film, more or less, we're mostly in a conventional realm of Moore's work being discussed. But even then that comes back around to his topics of discussion: Lost Girls, especially, on the nature of violence and sex, and conspiracy theorists revealing themselves far more uncomfortable with the actual chaos of the world than they'd ever want to admit.Sure, some of the Shaman stuff is deranged and takes some getting used to understanding or accepting (though it's quite funny to hear Moore talk about "becoming a magician" as opposed to facing a mid-life crisis, which it might well have been). Yet you get your limited bang for buck with this doc/philosophy/career retrospective. It's about ideas, and art, and that the apocalypse may ultimately be crap depending on your point of view. What's not to get excited about?

Basically all this film manages to do is prove how superior Alan Moore feels to everyone. Early in the movie he comments about his already huge ego as a 17 year old, and it seems that balloon has continued to become over-inflated throughout the intervening years.Moore does go into some detail about his childhood and how horribly bleak the world around him was - how he was saved by comic books and set about to write comics of his own. Interesting, but really of no value to anyone wanting to know 'how he did it'.The entire second half of the movie is Moore waxing poetic about magic, how he is a magician, how science knows and can prove nothing, and how much better his own ways are. He even goes so far as to quote a few others who he believes are "in the know" and then either overtly takes credit for their ideas or usurps them into a twisted notion he claims is his answer to life the universe and so on.Essentially, Moore seems to be trying to set himself up as a latter-day Alistair Crowley, rather unsuccessfully. As he goes on about his theories of meta-physics, pseudo-science, amateur psychology and spiritualism, it becomes quickly apparent that Moore not only wants, but craves attention - strange for a man who claims early in the film to have no use for his own celebrity.When I watched this film I thought I would get a look at how Moore created such amazing tales as V for Vendetta, From Hell, The Watchmen and others - instead, it just left me wondering how the poor fellow could have become so deluded about the world and his place in it.It will not surprise me to hear Moore has attempted to start his own cult, I just seriously doubt many people will be lining up to hear his brand of new-age meta-physical strangeness.He should have just stuck to comics...