July 11, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Minding Their Ms and Qs
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (or, LXG)
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know details of the plot, don't read on!]
Alan Moore is by all accounts, the greatest living author of comic books.
He writes intricate, wry, amusing comic book stories of epic scope and transgressing humor. And he is prolific as hell. The bibliography for Lance Parkin's Pocket Essential study, ALAN MOORE (ISBN 1 9703047 70 6), takes up almost half the book. Publishing since the early '80s, Moore, who turns 50 this year, has made his mark with a staggering succession of titles, ranging from the dystopian V FOR VENDETTA to the commercial SWAMP THING. His uncommon skills culminated in the early masterpiece WATCHMEN, a poignant, clever alternative universe tale that examines the very nature of superhero comic stories and their attraction to the public. WATCHMEN also showed the efficiency with which the comic book can delve into human psychology (while also employing a plot twist that anticipated the events of 911). Since then he has turned out a diverse series of comic books that range from the high to the low, from FROM HELL to TOP TEN. And now that we are nearing the end of the second series of THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN comics, we hear rumors that Moore may be giving up comics altogether in order to … practice magic.
Given what Hollywood has done to his work, who can blame him? Today's movie producers and screenwriters apparently think they write better than he does.
Despite the fact that Moore's impaneled world is extraordinarily cinematic, movie producers seem to think they know better. SWAMP THING was not based on the Moore's creative re-think of the series, which came later. In FROM HELL, a dense, historically detailed tale about Jack the Ripper, told with an unusual sense of story structure, became just another serial killer movie. Currently in production is CONSTANTINE, based on HELLBLAZER, with Keanu Reeves, about a character invented by Moore in SWAMP THING.
I'd like to say that THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN is long-awaited, but given what has happened to other adaptations of Moore novels, one greets the announcement of any new Moore adaptation with dread. What's worse, LXG was also produced by the same team that dismantled and restructured FROM HELL.
Well, I glumly dragged myself to THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN like an eight-year-old ordered to bed, and was not dissuaded from my glumness. LXG is a terrible movie. It's bad on two counts. If you revere Moore and the source novel, you will be outraged. If you simply want a well-written and engaging summer action film, you are doomed. The only people I can imagine enjoying the film are four-year-olds, 'cause a lot of things — like blimps — get blowed up good.
Scott Tipton does an excellent job of summarizing the original comic in his Comics 101 column, but his fears about the deviations made from book to movie prove true. Unexpectedly, CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE is faithful to the TV series, while LXG more or less throws out the source novel.
First off, Sean Connery's Allan Quatermain is made the main character, no doubt due to the actors "star power," which will only be diminished after people get a load of his quavering voice, lame Bondian quips, and stunt man-dependent escapades.
The lead character in the book was Wilhelmina Murray. She is the person who first gathers together most of the team, with the help of Captain Nemo (played by Naseeruddin Shah in a style more like the Indian Prince of the book rather than James Mason's neurotic Disney version).
Though she is highlighted in the trailer, and enjoys lots of reactions shots as she observes the action, Peta Wilson's Mina Harker, so renamed to more clearly indicated her lineage to DRACULA, is just another team member, though here a full-fledged vampire. She is also no "gentleman." In fact, no one is especially gentlemanly in this film. From the get-go, all of the characters are unremittingly hostile to each other, the producers apparently thinking that snobbish self-interest and snide comments define British high society. In any case, the team is already almost completely gathered by the time Quatermain and Mina meet, which at least serves the purpose of sparing the screenwriter further exposition.
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Two characters are added: Tom Sawyer (Shane West), an idea that doesn't bother me to much though little is done with him and his motivation for being there amid the team in the first place is as thin as rice paper, and Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Oscar Wilde's epicene sensualist, who here has the power to defeat death, thanks to the eternal life bestowing painting someone made of him.
In fact, in keeping with a recent tendency in pop culture, no one actually dies in the film, from Mina, who is now a vampire, of course, to Gray, and even to a another major character, who dies at the end but is shown in the last images of the film making the earth above his grave quiver with sequel-enhancing import. I would love to see a film wherein someone dies and freaking stays dead, as in real life. But then, these days movies are really cartoons. You can't believe anything you see, but it is all really just animation.
For the movie, the action is also switched from 1898 to — 1899, during an "uneasy peace." Something millennial about that, I suppose. The villain is "The Phantom," a blend of Genghis Kahn, Darth Vader, and Dr. Doom, who leads "The Order," a large and cumbersome accretion of faceless extras whose job is to fly through the air when blown up. The Phantom is a villain out of Feuillade's serials, and later Republic serials, and "anticipates" the villains of the James Bond movies. In fact, with its battles between LXG's movie's M and its Q (Quatermain), the film is a fantasy battle between Bond's lethargic boss and his acerbic weapons supplier.
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The plot starts out with the League given the task of protecting a peace conference in Vienna and then mutates into a plot about "weapons of mass destruction," the weapons turning out to be, in a crazy twist, the League itself. This clever surprise is just about the only thing I really liked about the movie. The script, credited to James Dale Robinson, is terribly written. Proof? Quatermain, as he is being led down some stairs in a building housing elements of the British government: "Where are we going? Australia?" When Quatermain meets Nemo, they engage in limp badinage that amounts to, "I am a captain," and "I hear you are more like a pirate," to which M (Richard Roxburgh), the mysterious government agent who has assembled the team, says with brusque impatience, "Gentlemen, please," as if he were interrupting the sparring of Shavian supermen. When Nemo's submarine first appears, someone asks, "But what is it?" "The future, gentlemen," is the cliché-ridden reply. When Quatermain is lured from Africa to serve his nation, he is told to "Pack for an English summer." The next thing we see is rain swept streets. When a character says that they must go to Paris to find another team member, the next thing you see on the screen is "Paris" printed over a CGI panorama of the city, a moment that evoke critical laughter at the screening I attended.
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In Paris, they are seeking Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng, from FROM HELL), who turns out to be King Kong in a top hat, one of the few elements retained from the novel. And Hyde's brilliant aperçu when also convinced to fight for king and country in return for permission to return to London? "Home is where the heart is." (In the book, Moore throws Auguste Dupin into the mix, blending Stevenson's Hyde with Poe's MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE.)
Yet despite the script's brevity and minimal plot, a lot of it doesn't make sense, or is unclear. Gray seems to already know both Quatermain and Mina. Why? There is tension between Quatermain and Mina (but not the kind in the comic). How did that happen? Did they too know each other before? It's not clear in the film. Worse, the script relies on the same old action film tricks time and time again. Our heroes have their weapons knocked out their hands at crucial moments in at least five instances. The camera revels in showing the items sliding across various floors.
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Indeed, the screenwriter, perhaps at the behest of the producers, or maybe Fox the studio, seems to have decided to adapt X-MEN rather then THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. Besides the concept of gathering a team of people with mutant skills, and having the letter X in the title, LXG recreates its predecessor's love triangle of Wolverine-Jean Grey- Cyclops, trading a Grey for a Gray (Sawyer-Mina-Dorian Gray). Perhaps the manufacturers reached the conclusion that no one had read the source comic, but everyone had seen X-MEN — and wanted to see it yet again. The action even ends up in an ice-bound lodge, where weapons of mass destruction are forged.
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One of the things I hated most about this film was its attitude to learning and books. No less than three lavish libraries are destroyed in the film. Mina is presented as a scientist, but she and the rest of the team is too dumb to pick up on obvious bits of information around them. This is an odd stance to take for a film mired in the great intellectual fantasies of the Victorian era, where men of action are also often men of thought.
Directed by Stephen Norrington, a special effects guy (ALIEN3) who went on to do the first BLADE, the film is both busy and dull at the same time. I actually fell asleep at a point when the plot dictated that the team head off to Venice, waking up to see Mina leading an army of bats through the sky. An inexperienced director, Norrington also doesn't get certain fundamentals right. In an early scene set in a men's' club in Africa, the sight line is off, so that characters don't look like they are looking at each other.
But this is not a director's movie. It's a producer's film. And it's terribly over-produced. LXG seems to want to capture the spirit of turn-of-the-century London with its gas lights and cobble stone streets and "uneasy peace" between the lower orders and the aristocrats. But instead of coming across like THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES or YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES it seems like a lukewarm remake of FROM HELL, using the same Czech sets and locations.
The film is gaining praise for its special effects, but the CGI looked obvious to me. A colonial building explodes and the flames are obviously imposed on the image. The water cascading off an ascending Nautilus looks artificial. In fact, any special effect in this film having to do with the four elements look rushed and clumsy.
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THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN is a project born of turmoil. It casts aside the perfectly adequate source book for a hash of recent movies. Connery famously had fights with contract director Norrington, who didn't move fast enough for the actor, also credited as one of the producers. But Connery has become a commodity. He sells himself over and over, and makes sure that he never deviates from the Connery persona he takes to be so popular with the public, the scornful master of the castle whose "sons" are never good enough. I suppose that we want something extraordinary from a film based on an Alan Moore comic. But to make the obvious pun, in this case the filmmakers are out of their league.
Historical note: This may be the first film whose credits end with an iTunes logo and the announcement that the soundtrack is available from iTunes.
NEXT TIME:BAD BOYS II
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