saw LXG (league of extraordinary gentlemen). not too good in my opinion. decent looking effects, bad character development, large suspension of disbelief. it's based on a little known (except in comic circles) graphic novel written by allan moore, one of the greatest writers in the comic book biz. i have reason to believe that hollywood muddied up the original material for "public consumption" and the story/character development, two things that moore is excellent at providing...the latter especially, were watered down, edited, thrown away...whatever you call it.
the characters are pretty interesting, though. in the comic the characters were meant to be legends but real (quatermain, jekyll/hyde, mina harker, dorian gray), meaning that while they were legendary, they were also real and existed in the same world...kinda like an alternate version of 1899, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. these characters, already having a background in literature, were fleshed or had the life breathed into them by moore and these characters, in particular, are very intriguiging as they are not the normal run-of-the-mill characters one finds in comics or movies.
but however intriguing these characters were, that's pretty much where my interest stopped regarding the movie. it seems like the important character development was all but left out of the movie, with the only noticeable scenes coming across as trite and uninteresting. one of the issues i had with the movie was this: quatermain was the good guy...the only good guy on the team (i'm not counting the american...i dont even know if he was in the original material) and the rest were tried and true villains...but they turned good, for the most part. perhaps with better character development, the reasoning used to fight the evil would have been more prevalent.
i do have a few good things to say about the movie. first, stuart townsend was a pretty cool dorian gray (a very interesting character). i think he played that part well. nemo's car, while way too sophisticated to exist in 1899 (then again, look at all the other stuff that was "around that time" in the movie) was still a damn fine-looking car. in fact, most of nemo's inventions were kickass looking, but where did he learn martial arts and become an indian (continental, not native american) worshipping kali, the hindu goddess of destruction. anyway, that's about it for my take on the movie. i'll probably lift this post and add it to the reviews page once i set that up. i'll also be on the lookout for the comic so i can see how it is. so, the story is interesting, but the movie didn't cut it.
my grade (typical scale of 10, including decimals): 6, just a 6...it wasn't that good.
Posted by godemperor at July 29, 2003 04:37 PM