http://lightsout.bla-bla.com/temp/lxg_small.mov
It doesn’t look nearly as bad as bad as it could have been. Of course, this is only a trailer. As major as the changes from the books are, I’m still looking forward to this film.
I have mixed feelings. On the one hand a movie staring a bunch of characters from Victorian era novels should be interesting even if it strays from the source text (or comic).
OTOH as an avid fan of the comic I really enjoy the copious amounts of time spent on characterization and dialogue and the trailer makes it look like the movie will primarily be action. It makes sense, nobody wants to see an adventure film with no action, but I’d enjoy some of Moore’s dialogue and plotting. But it’s standard practice for Hollywood to pump up the action in trailers, even if the actual movie is less than action packed, so it’s really too difficult to tell from the trailer which way it’s going to go.
Whatever, I’ll be there opening day.
The only members of the League the audience can be expected to be familiar with is Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde, and to a lesser extent Tom Sawyer (This is a different version of him than we’re familiar with, after all.) so I can only imagine there’ll be some character development.
Directed by the same guy who directed Blade, so I expect it to be very cool. On par, assuming they don’t cheap out on the EFX, with Spider-Man, The Hulk, and far surpassing X-Men.
And while LXG looks to be quite good, I’m waiting for the director’s next project (according to IMDB) - Ghost Rider. :flaming skull smiley:
“They are called The Vampire, The Gunman, The Pirate, The Immortal, The Freak, etc.”
Can I assume that The Ninja, The Spaceman, The Robot and The Werewolf will be in the sequel?
Or even better! Howabout an immortal vampire robot ninja freak who is also a gunslinger from outer space!
Wow. That looks supremely stupid. I hope it’s just a case of Bad Trailer Syndrome, but there doesn’t seem like any reason for me to waste my time and money at the theater on it instead of just re-reading the comics.
FWIW, Apple has a completely different trailer at their trailer site, but it’s not much of an improvement. Exchanged one set of bad trailer cliches for another and instead of the washed out monochrome images they sped up the same sequences so the movement is jerky.
I think most people would know the Invisible Man as well.
This movie was under such turmoil during its production, I am hoping for a decent movie at best. My complaint about the trailer is that they did not put the names of the characters on the screen and a majority of the audience had no idea it was a group of fictional characters together in a movie.
Wow, that trailer looks nothing like the movie I was picturing in my head. I get the feeling that this is going to be one of those movies where you’re at a disadvantage if you’d read the source material. As Asylum said, the central concept of the story is such a cool one that it should be at least interesting, but it looks like this will have very little in common with the comic book.
I’m not as big a fan of Alan Moore as some other CBG’s; I think he comes up with absolutely amazing ideas, but then presents them in such a wordy, flat, and self-conscious manner that it drains the life out of them. John Constantine didn’t become a really interesting character until Jamie Delano and then Garth Ennis took him over. And Tom Strong and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should be the end-all and be-all of comic books as far as I’m concerned, but just end up feeling kind of empty to me.
About the movie, one thing that has me concerned is that they’ve clearly made Quartermain the star (duh, it’s Sean Connery), which makes his and Mina Murray’s characters a lot less interesting. And I’m assuming from the trailer that they decided to completely do away with any pretense of “Is she or isn’t she a full-fledged vampire?” that’s been running through the comics over the last two years. Feh. I’ll still be there opening day, though.
Err, that’s kind of the point of the whole series.
They don’t make it obvious in the trailer, but the concept is that Victorian literary characters (Mina Murray from Dracula, Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Henry Jekyll) are part of a secret organization investigating paranomral crimes.
The problem is that for it to work, it requires a writer who’s aware of just how absurd the concept is but can still treat it as a realistic story. But then, not make it too realistic so that you lose out on all the fun of having these absurd characters running around. I don’t have high hopes that the moviemakers “get” that.
The Hollywood-ized LXG pretty much forces home the point, which is that the League are Victorian-Era Superhero team.
In the first series they get in the middle of a gang war between Prof. Moriarty and Fu Manchu.
In the second series (Which I haven’t been able to follow, no money for comics these days.) they’re battling H.G. Wells’ martians from War of the Worlds.
Them’s superhero adventures, they is!
James Robinson, whose name I’ve heard in connection to the screenplay, is up to the task. But if the director doesn’t understand the material, it doesn’t matter if the best screenplay ever written.
Well evidently my Quicktime player hates me, so I wasn’t really able to see a huge amount of detail here. I did seem to perceive that there was some sort of roadster involved in a few scenes, which tends to give me pause. Wasn’t the whole deal with the comic set in the late 19th century? Shouldn’t we reasonably expect movies set in the Victorian age to be free of car chases?
That, combined with the distressingly X-Men style logo, makes me very worried. I hope I’m wrong, the rest of it looked cool as hell.
Considering that Captain Nemo is responsible for a building a submarine that makes the Nuclear subs of today look primitive, a roadster isn’t really that great a stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, but Nemo was actually a 19th-century fictional character. I don’t recall the adventures of Speed Racer being widely read in Victorian society.
Wow, that last post was remarkably incomprehensible even for me. Let me take another stab here:
Captain Nemo and his submarine were, in fact, featured in 19th-century fiction. The whole point of League was to provide a novel take on said fiction, while remaining essentially true to the characters. Nemo never built a roadster, tho’ he surely was capable of it, and neither did any other character of that era. So the idea of the main characters tooling around in the Batmobile seems anachronistic to say the least.
Of course, one could well argue that, among other things, Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde was nothing like the one featured in Moore’s comic or the movie. So certain drastic changes to the source material aren’t necessarily bad. Hmm…
No! I will NOT be reasonable about this! You don’t have car chases in Victorian fiction! Hansom chases, yes. Submarine and dirigible combat, fine. Even steam-powered automata are perfectly acceptable to the era. But cars are right out! That’s my final word on it.
And if you do use a hansom, for Christ’s sake make sure it’s a hansom and not a coach-and-four.
I’ve read the first book, and although I was a bit startled at the Nautilus having metal tentacles, I liked pitting Moriarty against Fu Manchu, and was glad that Griffin (the Invisible Man) remained a homicidal psychotic.
A number of writers have tried this sort of pastiche now. My favorite is Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, which among other fun scenes has Dr. Jeckyll and Dr. Moreau debating human nature.
Well, I saw the trailer again before Daredevil today, and it got me even more distressed. I’ve gone from “Well, that’s not exactly how I would’ve done it…” to “Those Hollywood bastards have totally whored it up!” For starters, the whole “LXG” business never really hit me until I saw it there all big and glowing – I realize that the title is a little unwieldy, but that’s part of the charm. This isn’t supposed to be X-Men or Independence Day (excuse me, “ID-4”). It’s supposed to be pulp adventure, not all sleek and modern and gothic.
And the car really bugs me now, after Terrifel brought it up. Sure, if you’re accepting everything else, there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t have built a Batmobile. But that’s not the point. Why set your movie in Victorian England if you’re going to just put X-Men and Batman gadgets all through it? Why take a comic book that’s not exactly like every other comic book out there, and make a movie of it that is exactly like every other comic book movie?
Ah well. I’m sure I’m still going to see it, but I’m dreading another Avengers. ::shudder::
I don’t let these things distress me because the fact is the trailers for the recent spate of big comic-to-film adaptions almost always look bad. The movies themselves are usually pretty good.
Anyway, the changes are so massive that I find myself thinking of “LXG” as something entirely different from the comic series because, well, it is entirely different from the comic series. Dorian Gray, Tom Sawyer, Mina Harker as a vampire, a masked villain called the Fantom trying to start a world war . . .
This isn’t League of Extraordinary Gentleman as we know it, but that doesn’t preclude it from being a good movie.
And if the movie does stink, hey, it ain’t like the original comics have dissappeared or anything.
True. However, they were still very much in the Victorian Era. Granted, there were changes to the world, and changes to the characters, they were still something that we would recognize as being familiar characters in a semi-familiar world.
They weren’t, however, late 20th century superheroes in a late 20th century superhero movie who just happen to still see horses on the streets. That’s the impression I get from the trailer. But I know how trailers can be, so I’ll wait to see what people say when it comes out. I’m just a little concerned.