OK. So i saw what the cool kids are calling LXG a few weeks ago. More like a month, really. I’ve been wrestling with this beast of a review since then. I’m a fairly large Alan Moore fan. I think From Hell was a good story (with quite enough Victorian London T+A and penis slang, thank you) that was murdered by Johnny Depp and company. “Top 10″ is probably one of my favorite graphic novel series. I think that “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” is a breakthrough concept that looks at traditional literary figures in a way that is fresh and the antithesis of hidebond, while at the same time preserving their characters. League is incredible, and i await the arrival of the Volume 2 graphic novel with severely baited breath.
Needless to say i left the movie theatre feeling very cheated. The movie was godawful drek, and i can’t say as Moore was anywhere near the production. If he was it was probably for the purposes of extracting information via torture. Seeing your work ripped apart like that would be about like watching somebody shoot your dog, i think.
Yeah, i’m a little bit unimpressed.
See, everything stems from the fact that whoever is doing writing (outline drafts) for Hollywood has fastened on to a mad lib for writing comic book movies. It goes something like this:
- Go to comic store.
- Spin around 25 times with one hand out.
- Whatever your hand is pointing at, buy.
- If this is not a comic book, then purchase the person’s life story, streatch everything wildly out of proportion, and write “Coyote Ugly 2: The Ugly Stick”
- If you are pointing at a comic, don’t bother to buy it. Just read the first few pages, and make a photocopy of a cast shot
- Start writing your script. Here’s the outline: All cast members meet for the first time and start fighting crime. They will fight the first villian in the series.
I am getting pleanty tired of this formula, and in the case of League, it makes no damn sence. I mean if you don’t know who the Invisible (fucking) Man is, go back and finish Middle School you ignorant slope-browed troglodyte. The process of turning a 192 page book into a two hour movie should be entirely too easy. But hey, they had to first remove anything that made the series intelligent, add pleanty of stupidity, then showcase it with the most wretched action choreography that i’ve seen in years.
Lets start at the top. First off we can pretty well tell that Connery is one of the film’s producers. There was a little change from the comic… Quartermain is an opium addict whose particular inner demon is an extreme attraction to apotecary shops. Actually while guarding Mina (dressed as a hooker to draw out Hyde in Paris) he nips off for some juice of the poppy, drawing some pretty angry notes on his personell review. Also he seems to have been elevated to Team Leader. No way that they’d let Mina lead the group. I’d hate to think this was somehow related to her stance in the comic as an independant, divorced woman. This is the 21st century, after all.
Mina, Mina, Mina. How can you go from a badass in the comic to some insane Buffy reject so damn quickly. See in the book she never even mentions the D-word (Or the V-word at that). But ten minutes into the damn movie she’s all “Oh, and i’m the wife of Jonathan Harker, we fought Dracula and now i’m a Vampire.” I detest how idiots need major literary figures to wax into a silliloquy about their backstories in order to understand who they are. In the book she’s an independant woman who never takes off a scarf after “some business involving an Eastern European man.” In the movie she’s bereft of her leader role so of course she has to be the brain. I mean she is a woman after all. No reason to think that Captain Fucking Nemo, the inventor of the submarine, automobile, wireless telegraph, homing torpedo, and radar could tell what commonly used photographers chemicals are. No, we need a damn VAMPIRE with a chemistry set to perform the Time Honored Scientific Experiment (mixing two things in order to produce a colour change and fizz) to determine what flash powder is.
Nemo doesn’t have much of a role. Of course he leaves his sub all the damn time so there is that. Oh, and for some reason he, as a Hindu, knows tons of Kung Fu.
The Invisible Man is, amusingly enough, not there at all. See in the comic there was a series of “Immaculate Conceptions” at a convent in Britain and thereby the Man was tracked and dragooned into the League. In the movie… well, some random Cockney just took the formula. Isn’t that interesting. *Yawn*
Then there’s the travesty of Hyde smiling. Edward (damned) Hyde. The personification of everything evil about Jekyll learning to care about people. Hyde is no more capable of empathy and caring for his fellow being than any serial murderer. It should come as no surprise that i find Moore’s cannibalistic, venal mutant a lot more interesting and a good source of team friction (”How the hell am i supposed to work with this guy, he just tore someone in half and ate him!).
The two new characters are alright, i suppose. Sawyer is pretty cool, what with being the quintissential American. Brazen, twangy accent, has never seen a car before but is one hell of a stunt driver, shoots akimbo. If there was a Moore version of Sawyer, this is it. Remove the absurd Quartermain’s son subplot and you’ve got yourself a character. Dorian Gray is ok as well. Foppish, rude, very much an indolent british foil to these men (and female) of action.
There are two (count ‘em, two) dencent bits in this movie. Quatermain is taking automatic weapons fire in his lounge in Kenya and some other brit says “Automatic weapons? How unsporting!” To which he replys “They’re probably Belgian.” That was pretty pithy, and not altlgether uncool. The duel between the immortals started off really nicely. The witticisms before and after were more than badass.
The duels themselves are a huge dissapointment. I’m not trying to sound racist, but white people doing action choreography make me physically ill. It’s called a wide shot you idiot, learn how to use it. I’d love to see both people involved in a fight once in a while. Its a bit better than the Ridley Scott Jerky Cam that the entire Moriarty/Quartermain duel is shot in. I swear the camera spends all of its time looking at Sean Connery’s armpit, and for a while there i wasn’t even sure what the hell they were duelling with. Swords? Knives? Pipes? Fish? Who the hell knows, its just blurs on screen with some clanging sounds attached. I could get more enjoyment out of closing my damn eyes than actually watching that fight scene.
This doesn’t really help the movie. OK, so they find the big secret arms factory at the end: under production is a set of Nautiluses and big crazy tanks. That’s enough to worry any circa 1900 armed force, right? Well, armies of europe and abroad, no need to fret! The idiot designing the crap managed to build a factory in the middle of fucking mongolia. It is more than a day of dogsledding to the nearest river. See, if you are building an exact copy of a sub the size of an aircraft carrier, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the sub itself could, i don’t know, navigate all the way to your sub pen? And if there’s one thing that tanks love then it is being built on the top of a damn mountain in the middle of a snowstorm. I’d love to see him move an armoured division down the Himalayas during a blizzard. I think that would be very entertaining.
And its that type of crap that ruins the movie for me. You have an amazing concept for a team, all based on widely known figures and you have to completely mess it up with a Greatest Hits, everybody stands up and introduces themselves, here’s our first mission pile of garbage. My problems with Mina and Quartermain would be solved by setting this as Volume 3 and putting Mina’s translation into a full-blooded (haha) turning-into-bats vampire as a “coming out” metaphor. Quartermain would be coming to terms with his dead son in a way that doesn’t involve heavy drug use, basically a twelve-step program for weary british adventurers. Invisible Man and Hyde would be saved by an R rating and behaviour like their literary namesakes. I want a completely venal Invisible, and a totally brutal Hyde, is that too much to ask? Nemo takes care of himself, as once he’s Team Brain again he’ll have a role rather than just being an indian face on a submarine.
In closing, they didn’t have much the needed to adapt. Less than 200 pages. And if you cut title pages, expository mastheads, and one-page spreads then you probably have less than 180. Add to that the fact that you are introducing characters that are over 100 years old, and are iconic parts of literature and you don’t have to spend any time on intros. Just launch into an adventure, have fun with it, and try to create something that is just a bit less bland and stupid.
