Trivial questions about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (movie)

Cafe Society
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So League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came out in Europe last week, and I wasn’t planning on seeing it, since I haven’t read the graphic novel, and I had heard all sorts of bad things about it. But a couple of friends were going, so I joined them on a whim. There were eight of us: four hated it, four (including me) sort of liked it. It wasn’t great: there were too many explosions, not enough character development (in spite of the very, very interesting characters), and the idea was a lot more interesting than the actual movie. Still, I feel I got my 7 Euros worth. I now have a couple of unimportant questions though, just to make sure I’m not alone here. :slight_smile:

  1. Did anyone else think that Tom Sawyer looked like Malcolm McDowell in a Clockwork Orange? And while we’re at it, isn’t Tom Sawyer a frightfully uninteresting character to be in the League?

  2. There’s a scene towards the end where Quatermain is dying. He says to Sawyer something to the effect of: “May the next century be yours like this one was mine.” Did anyone else feel this was supposed to reflect on a larger “old world-new world” context? The British empire losing ground, while the United States become “leaders of the free world?” If it did, I thought it was out of place in this particular movie.

  3. Anyone agree that Hulk should have been a man in a costume, just like this movie’s Mr. Hyde? Hyde just looked a lot more convincing to me than Hulk did. Great transformation scene by the way.

  4. So Mina Harker’s a vampire. And she’s nothing like Dracula’s Mina. Still, I think both of these made perfect sense. The vampire thing is not very far fetched (since she was Dracula’s minion, after all) and anyone would get cold and emotionless after sucking on people’s necks for blood for a few years. Right?

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  1. Yes, he is frightfully uninteresting; he wasn’t in the comics, probably because it never occurred to Alan Moore to put a non-superpowered American into his Victorian British story.

  2. I got the impression that they were trying to make that point; however, they did it awkwardly, and it seemed tacked on and didn’t really match the story.

  3. I didn’t see The Hulk because the previews looked so horrible.

  4. Uh…sure, I guess so. I preferred to just think “Hey, a hot chick who can kick ass - cool!”

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Well… of course, I thought that too. :smiley:

But I just thought of another (perhaps less unimportant) question: why did the League go through the trouble of capturing Hyde when they could just as easily have approached Dr. Jekyll? (Okay, I know “why”: because the producers wanted to cram another action sequence into an already overstuffed movie. But I’m looking for an “in-movie” explanation.) My guess is that they didn’t know where to find Dr. Jekyll and that Hyde was a bit more conspicuous and easier to find. But then again, why didn’t they just follow Hyde from a distance, wait until the potion wore off, and then have a civilized conversation with Dr. Jekyll?

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The timeframe was entirely wrong for Tom Sawyer, too. Remember, his adventures with Huck Finn were before the American Civil War, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took place in the 1890s. Sawyer should’ve been much older.