The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [Media Notes 47]

What’s this movie about? More generally, what are movies like this about? Here’s what Wikipedia says:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, also promoted as LXG, is a 2003 dieselpunk superhero film loosely based on the first volume of the comic book series of the same name by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. It was released on 11 July 2003 in the United States, and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was directed by Stephen Norrington and starred Sean Connery (in his final live-action role before retiring), Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Shane West, Jason Flemyng and Richard Roxburgh. As with the comic book source material, the film features prominent pastiche and crossover themes set in the late 19th century. It features an assortment of fictional literary characters appropriate to the period who act as Victorian era superheroes. It draws on the works of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Ian Fleming, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Gaston Leroux and Mark Twain, albeit all adapted for the film.

I assume most viewers will be familiar with most of the material that’s been pastiched into this film. Indeed, I rather suspect that many/most viewers are familiar with the comic book series (I am not). 

But that’s all window dressing. This is an action-adventure film; which is to say it’s a roller coaster ride masquerading as a story. There are good guys and bad guys and a lot of energetic and violent interaction between them, often decked out in spectacular special effects. The good guys eventually win, though not without loses. That’s it. If you’re not there for the ride, the story’s irrelevant. If you are, what’s the story for?  

In this case the story is set in the late 19th century, though some of the technology we see – Nemo’s submarine and automobile – would have been impossible at that time, and, for that matter, would be preposterous now ([with a bit of exaggeration] that submarine had grander interior appointments than a luxury liner). This is science fiction without the pretense of a future. 

Of course, it’s also a story about how the forces that really govern the world are hidden from ordinary folk. Ordinary citizens of London, Kenya, Venice, and Mongolia (where the action takes place) know nothing about the organizations behind the destruction we see (much of Venice is blown up, as is a mountain retreat in Mongolia). The League is secret and so is his foe, The Fantom, actually Professor James Moriarty. 

So, we have a miscellaneous gang of secretive good guys fight a secretive villain across half the globe. That’s it. That’s the skin on this roller coaster ride. I’m sure a semiotic analysis of the characters and their powers, the places, and so forth would turn up something. But I’m not sure that gang is worth the candle.  

I’m reminded of Martin Scorsese’s critique of comic franchise films:

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. [...] 

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.  [...]

Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.

FWIW, the Wikipedia entry indicates that the creators of the comics were not at all happy with the film: 

In an interview with The Times, Kevin O'Neill, illustrator of the comics, said he believed the film failed because it was not respectful of the source material. He did not recognize the characters when reading the screenplay and claimed that Norrington and Connery did not cooperate. Finally, O'Neill said that the comic book version of Allan Quatermain was a lot better than the movie version and that marginalising Mina Murray as a vampire "changed the whole balance". The author of the comics Alan Moore was cynical of the film from early in its development, seeing that the two works bore little resemblance, distancing himself from the film altogether. "As long as I could distance myself by not seeing them," he said, he could profit from the films while leaving the original comics untouched, "assured no one would confuse the two. This was probably naïve on my part." 

Neither was Sean Connery, who launched his career in one of the most famous film franchises of all time, James Bond.