It's somewhat interesting to review this film fifteen years after its release, now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is leading the way in franchises full of superhero characters and when even a TV series, "Penny Dreadful," figured out how to better combine a bunch of Victorian-era literary characters together. Part of the reason "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" didn't work is that the script is terrible, especially after the initial recruitment of characters is done. Another is that most of the characters get short changed by the focus being on, besides the CGI, star Sean Connery, who, reportedly, argued with the director throughout the production.
The bigger problem, however, is the disregard for those characters' literary traditions. Why even use them, then? I've never read the comics that the movie is based on, although I've heard plenty of grumbling about how it diverges from the series, but I have read most of the original novels, or at least seen other, better film adaptations of those works. Doyle, Haggard, Stevenson, Stoker, Twain, Verne, Wells, Wilde--so much to work with, so little used. I specifically came to this movie in my quest to see a bunch of movies at least partially based on Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," and the mishandling of his Mina is arguably the most egregious here. Not only is she significantly marginalized from her role in Stoker's story, but also, I hear, from her leadership role in the comic. In the novel, she became the real leader of the gang trying to kill Dracula, while Van Helsing, akin to Sean Connery's role in the movie, did a lot of the loud talking many might mistake as leadership. She largely did this by becoming Stoker's surrogate storyteller within the book, sorting together the various diary entries, letters, records and other accounts that formed the book's epistolary structure. It would've been interesting if the movie had tried to do something similar given the characters and literary traditions involved.
Instead, they turn Mina into a heroic vampire, and she fights another immortal, Wilde's Dorian Gray. It's awful. "Penny Dreadful" handled its immortals better, in that case Gray and the Frankenstein creatures, which I think was the best part of the otherwise lackluster series, as the immortals struggled with and divorced themselves from the lives of mortals. Oh, and apparently this movie's Mina is a chemist, too, for some reason, even though they have Dr. Jekyll and an Invisible Man aboard. (To be fair, I guess, it should be noted that almost every Dracula-related movie has diminished Mina's role and many of them are quite sexist about it.) Jekyll, when Hyde, is basically Marvel's the Hulk. Meanwhile, Nemo is merely a source of transportation, Tom Sawyer is there for supposed youth and American appeal and, as for "M," see another recent TV series, instead, "Sherlock."
(Mirror Note: I've been noting the use of mirrors in Dracula movies, as they're often a prominent feature, but here mirrors are, instead, employed for Jekyll/Hyde, so the two can talk to each other.)
The bigger problem, however, is the disregard for those characters' literary traditions. Why even use them, then? I've never read the comics that the movie is based on, although I've heard plenty of grumbling about how it diverges from the series, but I have read most of the original novels, or at least seen other, better film adaptations of those works. Doyle, Haggard, Stevenson, Stoker, Twain, Verne, Wells, Wilde--so much to work with, so little used. I specifically came to this movie in my quest to see a bunch of movies at least partially based on Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," and the mishandling of his Mina is arguably the most egregious here. Not only is she significantly marginalized from her role in Stoker's story, but also, I hear, from her leadership role in the comic. In the novel, she became the real leader of the gang trying to kill Dracula, while Van Helsing, akin to Sean Connery's role in the movie, did a lot of the loud talking many might mistake as leadership. She largely did this by becoming Stoker's surrogate storyteller within the book, sorting together the various diary entries, letters, records and other accounts that formed the book's epistolary structure. It would've been interesting if the movie had tried to do something similar given the characters and literary traditions involved.
Instead, they turn Mina into a heroic vampire, and she fights another immortal, Wilde's Dorian Gray. It's awful. "Penny Dreadful" handled its immortals better, in that case Gray and the Frankenstein creatures, which I think was the best part of the otherwise lackluster series, as the immortals struggled with and divorced themselves from the lives of mortals. Oh, and apparently this movie's Mina is a chemist, too, for some reason, even though they have Dr. Jekyll and an Invisible Man aboard. (To be fair, I guess, it should be noted that almost every Dracula-related movie has diminished Mina's role and many of them are quite sexist about it.) Jekyll, when Hyde, is basically Marvel's the Hulk. Meanwhile, Nemo is merely a source of transportation, Tom Sawyer is there for supposed youth and American appeal and, as for "M," see another recent TV series, instead, "Sherlock."
(Mirror Note: I've been noting the use of mirrors in Dracula movies, as they're often a prominent feature, but here mirrors are, instead, employed for Jekyll/Hyde, so the two can talk to each other.)
