March 31 movie: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Why, when we have so many good movies on the DVR and from Netflix just waiting to be viewed, did we sit through this? I loved Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic. Which should have been reason enough to avoid this crap fest. But no, I had to see for myself if it was any good. Well, it wasn't! Now you know.
Georg said he thought it might work better if you didn't know the comic existed. I don't know about that. I can't imagine the movie would have been interesting to people who aren't already at least somewhat familiar with the characters. But people who have the teeny tiniest bit of knowledge of 19th century literature would have to be put off by the ultra-lame exposition from Mina Harker, Dorian Grey and Allan Quartermain, each in turn explaining who they are. Couldn't they have worked the backstories into the movie somehow? Did we have to see Dorian Grey stop the action and give a speech that began with "There's this painting, see..." Does any movie viewer like that kind of condescension? I sure don't.
I could have forgiven the near total departure from the comic, if it had provided an entertaining story in its own right. But instead we got a jumbled mess. All I can say is, now I understand why Moore calls making movies of his work "butchering [his] children."
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I'm not sure where the blame falls for the crapfest which was LXG. James Robinson, the screenwriter, is capable of very good work--his long run on the comic Starman was intermittently brilliant.
I had an unpleasant run-in with Don Murphy, the producer, and could easily be convinced that he was the main problem, but that's probably taking the easy way out. I've heard rumors of Sean Connery hijacking the production, but that wouldn't address problems in the screenplay....
Ooh, gossip about movie producers! Can you share?
The screenplay definitely had serious problems. I realize that even a relatively fluff Moore story has subtleties that can't be easily adapted to film. And I knew in advance that they were going to have to drop the whole Chinese storyline -- the commentary on Victorian xenophonia wouldn't translate, it would just come off as blatantly racist.
But what they ended up with left me scratching my head at the utter stupidity. They stripped away everything interesting about the characters and replaced it with either nothing -- Captain Nemo who has no personality at all -- or action movie cliches -- Quartermain trying to redeem himself after having allowed his son to die. Isn't that the plot of about 27 Jet Li movies?
the whole sorry mess gave off the feel that, anticipating negative feedback from confused test screenings, they just decided to assume the audience was made up of braindead dolts. i do think that the casting of sean connery as quatermain at least reinforced their decision to soften off the rougher antisocial edges (y'know, the whole opium thing)
Those backstory "See my husband and I were in Transylvania, they have vampires there, and look, I have these bites on my neck!" speeches were so bad I literally had my hands over my ears a couple of times.