2003-07-09 - IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN?: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Your humble Comics 101 professor was recently interviewed for the University of Massachusetts’ DAILY COLLEGIAN about, you guessed it, comic books. In the interview, I was asked what I thought of the comic-book-to-movie trend that’s so hot in Hollywood at the moment. My response?

“Well, it’s good until the first bad one hits. It’s all about trends, and of course, right now we’re in the middle of the big superhero trend. As long as the movies are of a high quality and still making money, it’s a great thing because it’ll just bring in more. Comics are a huge mine of really creative material just waiting to be turned into films, and Hollywood is just keying in on that. That’s why every comic you can imagine has now been optioned. But once that first stink bomb hits and hits big, everyone’s gonna back off. So if you’re a comic-book fan now, you’ve really gotta hope that stinker isn’t coming.”

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN hits theatres this Friday, July 11. I really gotta hope that stinker isn’t coming.

This is, granted, an entirely unfair supposition on my part. I haven’t read the script, which is by James Robinson, one of my all-time favorite comics writers, the creator of the already-a-classic-in-my-book STARMAN series. I haven’t seen much of the movie at all beyond the trailers, which have been widely varying in both quality and tone. I enjoyed director Stephen Norrington’s take on BLADE (although I thought Guillermo del Toro blew it away with the sequel). There have been all kinds of rumors flying about a troubled set and post-production, everything from Sean Connery popping Norrington in the snoot to Connery taking over editing of the film himself.

And yet all this means nothing once I sit down in the theatre and wait for the curtain to rise. I was horrified by the trailers to DAREDEVIL, and wound up liking the film a great deal. X2 was surrounded by rumors of a troubled production, far more so than LXG (as the studio’s marketing mavens have redubbed it – can’t have a big word like “extraordinary” in a title – or words at all, for that matter), and yet X2 is widely considered one of the best comic translations ever, and is keeping up with the MATRIX sequel at the box office, an outcome nobody expected.

So, hope springs eternal. Nobody would be happier than me to find LXG to be a kickass action movie with intelligence and wit. Especially since the source material is so inspired. Published by DC Comics’ Wildstorm imprint, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN is that most rare of commodities: a truly original idea that takes some of the oldest and most well-worn characters and concepts from classic literature, and finds a way to make them feel new and vital after a century’s worth of translation and adaptation.

Written by comics master Alan Moore and drawn by Kevin O’Neill, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN takes five classic characters from 19th-century literature and adds a 20th-century comic-book twist: teaming them up, a la DC’s JUSTICE SOCIETY or JUSTICE LEAGUE. Set primarily in 1898 London, the series details the formation of the League by the British government to combat what they believe to be a truly monstrous foe, and their subsequent struggle against an entirely different threat altogether.

Not only is the book remarkably accurate to the time period and the source materials in dialogue, detail and rendering, but the comics themselves are designed to resemble turn-of-the-century “penny dreadfuls,” the cheaply produced periodicals turned out as quick, disposable entertainment for the masses, including a 19th-century-style letters column and hilariously politically incorrect vintage advertisements. (One of these advertisements, an ad for a feminine hygiene product called the “Marvel ‘Whirling Spray’ Syringe,” was yanked at the last minute by DC executive Paul Levitz for fear of offending DC’s longtime rivals.)

Moore and O’Neill have filled the series with countless cameos from Victorian literature: everyone from Pollyana to Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Moreau can be found.

The art is intricately detailed and teeming with historical accuracy, yet the base of O’Neill’s art style is slightly cartoony, which actually serves the story better than an overly rendered realistic style would, and makes some of the series’ more violent and graphic moments all the more unsettling.

To get a real sense of just how exhaustively researched the series is, after you’ve read the comics, head over to Jess Nevins’ Comic Book Annotations Web site, and read for yourself, thanks to Nevins’ crack research, just how much work, thought and planning went into every issue. It’s astounding.

Since I don’t know how much of the film’s plotline has been retained from the comics scripts, I’m going to dispense with my usual meandering through the storyline out of respect for those who don’t want the movie spoiled for them, and focus my remarks on the team members themselves. With that, let us meet the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, shall we?

As the story opens, we meet the first recruit for the League, Wilhemina Murray, an uptight, mannered divorcee with an affectation for rather tight neckwear. In time, her married name is revealed: Mina Harker, the damsel in distress from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel DRACULA. Unlike most of her teammates, Murray has no special gift or superhuman power to bring to bear, save an indomitable will, and the ability to cow the otherwise male members of the League. As for the predilection for scarves, it’s clear that it’s meant to cover up the wounds from the vampire’s bite, making for a startling moment when the scarf is finally removed.

Mina Harker was played by Helen Chandler in the 1931 Tod Browning classic DRACULA, and by Winona Ryder in Francis Ford Coppola’s less than critically acclaimed 1992 remake. Peta Wilson (LA FEMME NIKITA) takes up the role in LXG, and from the trailer it looks as though the concept of a tough-as-nails yet mortal Englishwoman has been replaced with a fully vampiric Mina, which goes against not only the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN comics, but Stoker’s novel as well.

Murray’s second recruit in the LEAGUE comics is the mad captain from Jules Verne’s classic 1870 novel 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, Captain Nemo, with his famed submarine the Nautilus serving as a de facto headquarters for the group. Moore’s version sticks close to the character as written in Verne’s 1874 sequel MYSTERIOUS ISLAND: here the “science-pirate” Nemo is an embittered Indian, now working with the British government only out of convenience, feeling his only loyalty to the sea itself. The LXG version of Captain Nemo, portrayed by Naseeruddin Shah, looks to be following Moore’s lead, if the turban is any indication.

The most famous cinematic portrayal of Nemo is, of course, that of James Mason in Walt Disney’s 1954 family classic 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, also starring Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre. Just recently released on DVD, the Disney version holds up surprisingly well (if you set aside the cringeworthy scenes where Kirk Douglas belts out a sea shanty), with solid performances from Douglas, Lorre and especially Mason as an intense, haunted Captain Nemo. And for a film that’s almost 50 years old, the visual effects are extremely striking – that giant squid still looks pretty sharp.

Next on Murray’s shopping list is famed adventurer Allan Quatermain. However, the legendary hero has sunk to rock bottom, as Murray finds him in an opium den in Cairo, a shell of his former self.

The Allan Quatermain character first appeared in H. Rider Haggard’s series of adventure novels, with KING SOLOMON’S MINES probably the most well known. Allan Quatermain was the original Great White Hunter-type adventurer, with characters such as Indiana Jones bearing more than a little Allan Quatermain influence.

Allan Quatermain has been brought to the big screen three times previous, most recently by Richard Chamberlain in the truly forgettable KING SOLOMON’S MINES. This 1985 snoozer was produced just after RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK hit it big, and is notable only for an extremely early appearance by Sharon Stone, and if memory serves, some of the most politically incorrect portrayals of African natives in the last twenty years.

Allan Quatermain is played in LXG by Sean Connery, which is something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, how many bankable elderly British action stars are there who could pull off the part? It’s a pretty short list. Connery, maybe Patrick Stewart. The down side is that scoring an actor of that magnitude is by definition going to move the character away from its comic-book roots. You don’t pay out Sean Connery-type money to have him play an indecisive, marginally effective former opium addict. From the looks of the trailer, not only is the film’s Allan Quatermain hale, hearty and kicking ass, he also looks to be the team’s leader, with Mina relegated to a supporting role.

Back to the comic. With Quatermain now sober, he and Murray travel to Paris to acquire their next recruit, with the help of Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal detective character C. Auguste Dupin, made famous in Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter.” In following the trail of a murder of prostitutes, the trio meets up with the League’s next member: meek Henry Jekyll and his horrifying alter ego, Edward Hyde, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

Hyde’s portrayal in the comics, as a huge monstrous gorilla-like creature, differs greatly from Stevenson’s description of Hyde as “small and apelike” in the novel, although Moore takes care to note the discrepancy and explain it in the course of the series.

From the quick flashes of a freakishly huge CGI-created Mr. Hyde shown in the trailer, it looks as though the filmmakers are following this tack as well. Can’t say from the trailers how Jason Flemyng will chose to portray Henry Jekyll, but it’ll be hard to top the definitive Jekyll /Hyde performance given by Spencer Tracy in the 1941 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.

With Jekyll granted amnesty by the British government in exchange for working with the League, Murray, Quatermain and Nemo infiltrate a girls’ boarding school so as to capture their final unwilling recruit, Dr. Griffin, from H.G. Wells’ novel THE INVISIBLE MAN. It seems the invisible Griffin has taken up residence in the boarding school, which accounts for the sudden influx of “immaculate conceptions” taking place among the increasingly pregnant student body. As foul an introduction as this is to Griffin, his actions over the course of the series bear it out; even more so than Edward Hyde, his is an irredeemable soul.

As LXG’s Invisible Man Rodney Skinner (I’d imagine Universal Studios holds rights to the “Griffin” name), Tony Curran has his work cut out for him, because it’s awfully hard to top Claude Rains’ fantastically manic and downright creepy performance in James Whale’s 1931 masterpiece THE INVISIBLE MAN.

With the League now complete, the team is set off on a mission to reclaim the highly valuable anti-gravity metal Cavorite (taken from H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON) from the fiendish Oriental crimelord who rules the East end of London: of course, who else could it be but Fu Manchu, from the famed Sax Rohmer novel THE MYSTERY OF DR. FU MANCHU.

The League will eventually discover who’s really behind both their formation and the heist of the Cavorite, but we’ll leave some questions unanswered in case the film makes use of these details as well. The first LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN 6-issue mini-series is available collected as a trade paperback, and the second volume, also numbering six issues, is about to wrap up. As for the second series, I’ll leave you with this: There’s another famous H.G. Wells story that takes place at about the same time: WAR OF THE WORLDS.

As for LXG, the filmmakers apparently decided that five members were not enough, and added two more to the mix. First, touted in the trailers as “THE IMMORTAL,” is Dorian Gray, from Oscar Wilde’s novel THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. Whereas the original character is merely kept young and handsome, thanks to the mysterious painting of him that ages in his place, advance publicity for LXG seems to indicate that the film character will actually be kept safe from any harm, with wounds and injuries magically healing themselves. The second new addition to the team, reportedly at the studio’s insistence that there be an American in the film, is “THE SPY,” none other than a grown-up Tom Sawyer from Mark Twain’s THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER. While this idea has elicited many groans from loyal fans of the series, I must confess that I find the idea to have a certain goofy charm, and to be in keeping with the spirit of the concept.

There’s a story I read once about an author, whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment. During an interview, a journalist asked him, “How did you feel about the filmmakers ruining your book like that?” The author replied, “They didn’t ruin it. It’s right over there on the shelf. I can read it whenever I want.”

Will the film live up to the comics? Only time will tell. But it sure can’t ruin them.

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