{"id":721,"date":"2011-02-21T16:09:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-21T16:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=721"},"modified":"2014-06-24T18:19:24","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T17:19:24","slug":"the-league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=721","title":{"rendered":"THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/a>Comics, at least in the hands of a talented creative teams, are a much denser medium than film. Comics can encompass more visual information and more complex literary ideas, page for page, than a film script. This is certainly true of Stephen Norrington\u2019s attempt to convert Alan Moore and Kevin O\u2019Neill\u2019s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen<\/em> to the big screen. For reasons that are too often the director\u2019s fault, it cannot match its source for intelligence, style or drama.<\/h3>\n

Film images flash past at twenty\u2013four frames a second and, at least in the cinema, cannot be pored over in the same way as a comic book frame. Technically, then, The League<\/em> on screen cannot match the visual richness of the comic. One of the book\u2019s great appeals, the way in which O\u2019Neill filled every panel on every page with entertaining incidental detail, is inevitably lost.<\/p>\n

Norrington\u2019s The League<\/em>, if never matching O\u2019Neill\u2019s art, at least manages to develop an appealing look of its own. The opening sequence in Africa, Dorian Gray\u2019s library and the interior of the Nautilus are, in their own way, well designed and stylish. Sadly the one element of the design that survives from the comic books almost intact \u2013 Mr Hyde is fairly faithfully transferred thanks to CGI \u2013 is the least convincing of the film\u2019s special effects. I especially hated the badly-handled transformation sequences and the way the blobby, indistinct Hyde never seems to properly connect with the world around him.<\/p>\n

However, if the look of the film is reasonably successful, the script and plot seriously disappoint. Film adaptations rarely manage to encompass the same degree of character development and complexity as their literary sources. Alan Moore\u2019s The League<\/em> covered a lot of ground so it is not entirely surprising that the film fails to match the scope of the original. What is disappointing, however, is the way in which the film fails to even aspire to a similar degree of intelligence. Norrington\u2019s film is clich\u00e9d in a way that Moore\u2019s work never is, the dialogue is, in places, unbearably stiff and there are gaping holes in the story\u2019s logic.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s nadir is a sequence where The League must save Venice from being sunk by a big bomb in the foundations of the city\u2019s buildings. The filmmakers seem to believe that the city of Venice is built out into the Adriatic on stilts rather than on an island, which rather sums up the stupidity of this sequence. From the moment that the aircraft\u2013carrier\u2013sized Nautilus sails up a Venetian canal to the villains\u2019 inevitable escape, the whole misadventure is nonsensical and ineptly realised. The action and dialogue are turgid, the ideas ridiculous and the whole thing is just infuriatingly bad.<\/p>\n

But the bigger problems come from the way Norrington has messed around with the source material. The introduction of Tom Sawyer (the wooden Shane West), presumably to give American audiences someone to \u201croot\u201d for is a serious mistake. The League<\/em> was essentially be Quatermain\u2019s story but the introduction of Tom Sawyer robs Quatermain of any serious opportunities for character development, gets in the way of his action scenes and adds nothing to the group dynamic. Dorian Gray\u2019s replacement of Quatermain as Mina Harker\u2019s \u201clove interest\u201d further diminishes the role of the protagonist.<\/p>\n

Sean Connery was always going to be too vital a screen presence to succeed as the rather wasted and embittered old hero in Moore\u2019s original. Still, Connery\u2019s screen persona is curmudgeonly enough these days to suggest that, given the chance, he could have made a success of the role. He never gets that chance as the reworking of the plot removes all his character\u2019s interesting potentials and it is easy to see how, as rumours suggest, he might have become frustrated at the treatment of his character and the wasting of his talents.<\/p>\n

However, not all the changes are for the worse. Dorian Gray\u2019s introduction may help unbalance the whole story but Stuart Townsend is fabulously over the top in the role. As an invulnerable immortal he is wonderfully louche<\/em> and gets almost all of the film\u2019s scarce good lines. Pausing to heal during a fight with an equally immortal and indestructible foe he quickly becomes bored and sighs camply: \u201cWe\u2019ll be at this all day!\u201d<\/p>\n

Issues over character rights apparently prevented the use of Hawley Griffin as The Invisible Man, but I rather liked his replacement, a wideboy thief named Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran) who stole the potion.<\/p>\n

In the end, however, it is the script that drags Norrington\u2019s The League <\/em>down from the ranks of the merely misguided to the truly awful. It is full of painfully obvious, pointless statements. So, Naseeruddin Shah (who otherwise does a rather good job as Captain Nemo) is forced to point to a (ludicrously out-of-place) sports car and declaim: \u201cI call it an aut-o-mo-bile.\u201d And Quatermain shouts: \u201cVenice still stands!\u201d when half of the city has been flattened.<\/p>\n

None of these characters speak or act like their literary originals. Moore, in the comic book version, takes liberties but, at least, he brought a knowledge and understanding of these characters to the page. With Norrington\u2019s version you are simply left to wonder why they bothered calling the characters Quatermain or Harker. They might as well be called Smith or Jones. They bear no relation to their supposed source material.<\/p>\n

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen<\/em> is a disaster on the scale of Batman and Robin<\/em> or Battlefield Earth<\/em>. Indeed, in some ways, it is an even bigger disappointment than either of these films. The kernel of the idea was so good and the source material so exciting that the failure of Norrington\u2019s film to come close to exploiting all that potential is shattering. Add to that the fact that this disappointing outing all but guarantees that the brilliant second story in the sequence will never be adapted to the screen, and all those involved have a lot to answer for.<\/p>\n

(Originally published in Matrix<\/em> 163, Sept\/Oct 2003)<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Comics, at least in the hands of a talented creative teams, are a much denser medium than film. Comics can encompass more visual information and more complex literary ideas, page for page, than a film script. This is certainly true of Stephen Norrington\u2019s attempt to convert Alan Moore and Kevin O\u2019Neill\u2019s The League of Extraordinary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11,8,10],"tags":[51,76,43,46],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/lxg.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-bD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":793,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}