The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,

i.e. Embarrassing Idiots

I would have seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen even if the outside temperature hadn't been regularly hitting 100 F + here, because I like Sean Connery. I also seem to recall an old novel of this same title that I loved when I was a kid, hungrily fueling my imagination on Rafael Sabatini (whose books are now available again from one of my publishers, Hidden Knowledge!), John Buchan, and books like The Adventurers Club. Also Bomba the Jungle Boy; honest. That is, what kids read in those days instead of Harry Potter, or instead of going to see Raiders of the Lost Souped-up Car Chase with Polymorphing Killer Robots.

Hot outside or not, I almost walked out on League.

A rough approximation of a snippet of dialog follows:

Blank #1: "He has planted bombs under Venice! We have to find them!"

(Shot of cold stone cellars packed with bombs)

Blank #2: "How can we do that in time? Venice is huge!"

Ladies and gentlemen, Venice is not huge; it wasn't huge in 1899 either. Venice is tiny: small-scale, intricate architecture packed into very little space, like most European cities, because on a comparatively small, heavily populated continent, farmland is at a premium. You don't sprawl your cities all over it. The buildings of Venice are supported by pilings driven into the mud of the lagoon to make something approximating dry land to build on in the first place. This also means that Venice does not have cellars to plant bombs in.

None of this is arcane knowledge. Open any ordinary Italian guidebook and it is all explained, along with the fact that no cars are permitted in the city because they just wouldn't fit (well, as I said, Venice is small); and the fact that "Carnival in Venice" does not mean a featureless square packed with mumbling, jouncing, probably computer-generated figures in silly white masks; and the fact that the canals of Venice are on the average 8 feet deep and not suitable for Captain Nemo's submarine, shown here as roughly the size two Great Blue Whales glued end to end.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is based on a comic book series that seems to have a clever premise and a decent reputation: in an alternative London a decade or more before the Great War, a clutch of adventure-fiction heroes (long since out of copyright and so fair game) come together to fight Evil (well, of course; it's comics), each bringing to the mix some fantastic talent or record of derring-do.

Some folks have scolded me for tearing into this movie version without having read the comics because the comics are so much better, and because some of the idiocies committed in the movie were there in the comics (only better grounded), so they had to use them in the movie. This is called having your cake and eating it too. Moreover it's a lot like saying that nobody can properly enjoy or critique, say, The Hunt for Red October without first slogging through the novel on which it is based (I would rather stick chopsticks in my eyes, but that is by the way).

Well, I am not moved. I calls 'em as I sees 'em, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a disjointed, murky, overdressed and over-amped garbage heap. It reeks of something known in the entertainment business as "flop sweat", meaning the sweat that runs down a performer's face when he or she is on stage and realizes with horror that what he or she is doing is rubbish, and that everybody can see that it's rubbish. But once you've started you can't just stop, say, "Sorry, folks, I don't know what I was thinking," and go home; it's not done.

So I can imagine the frantic story conferences as the script falls apart faster than it's being made up: "This is reeaaalllly bad and we have a deadline; what can we do to spice it up?"

"I know, let's bring in Tom Sawyer as one of the Gentlemen! He's Twain's Tom grown up, and he'll be young and brash and stir up all those fusty old European ikons while appealing to American baby-boy movie goers."

"Great! Then we can have a son-father thing with him and Connery -- "

"Tom will look like Leonardo di Caprio, though we can't afford Leo so it'll be a cheaper look-alike, and that will draw the girls -- "

"We'll make him a reformed outlaw -- "

"No, no, that would be Huck Finn; this is Tom, and he's, he's a -- he's a brain surgeon!"

"No, wait; nobody in this movie has a brain -- "

"Okay, he's a lawman -- he has a Winchester that Connery can teach him to shoot better -- "

"No, no, he's a Secret Service man, and he has two Winchesters -- "

"And in the end he can bring down the bad guy with his rifle at a thousand yards, to make Connery proud of him -- "

Etc. And all to no avail, because this is all arrant nonsense. For one thing, if you bother to check out Mark Twain it will become apparent that Tom is this author's version of the classic American entrepreneur in the making, quick to exploit others for his own profit. Moreover, his story is set in pre-Civil War days, so by 1899 he'd be a prosperous middle-aged businessman with a fortune, a paunch, and a reputation for sharp dealing.

No, it's Huck Finn who's the rogue with the heart of gold, the one who just might end up in something resembling the Secret Service.

For another thing, as I recall it was the Sharps Buffalo rifle that could bring down a target at great distances, not the Winchester, good as that gun was.

Mind you, as not just a writer of SF and fantasy but a reader of it, I am crazy about fantasy; I long to be drawn into delightful and surprising improbabilities, I am eager to be entertained by things that I know, in my rational mind, are nonsense.

But you have to convince me. You have to come up with a plausible explanation of your nonsense in order to merit my willing suspension of disbelief. You have to earn my trust.

You do this by proving that you've put in the thought and imagination that make it worth my while to follow where you're leading me. I'll believe that Mina Harker has been turned into a vampire (and somehow also a chemist??!!) by Dracula's bite, if you devise a clever and entertaining way of convincing me that these improbabilities are true. What you can't do is just show me an actress labeled "Mina Harker" with bite-holes in her neck who goes into a greedy swoon at the sight of blood and who looks at some stuff in a test tube, and the just expect me to take your word for it.

The League's makers did no imaginative justification. In fact, they did nothing at all, bar some fights too fast to follow, sound to loud to hear, and various other technical summersaults too boring to go into (well, I must put in a word, or a snort, about their "Mr. Hyde", who's an animated goblin the size of a communications satellite, a blimp of roaring, swollen, knuckle-dragging flesh teetering about on tiny little legs and pointy feet; you could weep, really).

This movie is deeply insulting in every possible direction.

A writer with at least a touch of genius thought up and developed Dorian Grey (yes, he of the infamous portrait: author, Oscar Wilde); the same goes for Alan Quartermain (H. Rider Haggard wrote pulp, but wrote it well), and the Invisible Man (H.G. Wells was no slouch either), and Mina Harker (DRACULA has been in print pretty much continuously for over a hundred years now), and Dr. Jekyll of Hyde fame (Robert Louis Stevenson) and Captain Nemo (Jules Verne). Not to mention who the colorless clown who's the movie's super villain turns out to "really be" (and no, I include no spoiler alert -- you cannot spoil a trash heap); Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' archenemy.

I know better than most that all writers steal from each other and from the past; it's part of the job and the tradition of storytelling, and it's why there is a thing we call "literature" instead of a lot of unrelated notes and pages floating around at random. Here's a personal example: I read Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda in my teens and loved it. I loved handsome, bad-boy Rupert of Hentzau and his boss, stressed-out and snappish Duke Michael of Strelsau, in that book. They were so vivid that I just couldn't get enough of them, and the only way to have more was to make some myself.

So, decades later, Rupert became Servan d Layo and Duke Michael became Eykar Bek, two of the protagonists of my first novel, Walk to the End of the World. You'd barely recognize them unless you were aware of their distant origins (for one thing, they've become lovers in a futuristic homosexual culture). I let them live a good, long time in my mind, maturing from the seeds planted by Hope's book into hardy plants of my own raising, infused with new sources of vitality and pruned to the needs of the world I created for them.

Many, many novelists begin their careers this way: they imitate, and if they have talent they change what they've imitated to make it their own.

Take an example closer to the case in point: Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, and Alfred Bester's The Stars my Destination. The first is a 19 C swashbuckler, the second a space opera published in the mid-20th C. Bester quite deliberately lifted Dumas' plot: the dreaded Chateau d'If, the prison in which honest sailor Edmond Dantes is wrongfully locked up, becomes Gouffre Martel, the caves where space-hand Gully Foyle is imprisoned; the evil landsmen who betrayed Edmond become fascinating intergalactic versions of themselves in Bester's robust and colorful future, as full of passion and fear and energy as Dumas' people ever were.

Because Dumas was brilliant and Bester was brilliant, the story and its people took off in Bester's hands too and became a classic of SF, created in response to Dumas' creation -- called forth by it.

This is why ideas are not copyrightable: other folks have played with a current author's toys, and younger folks get to do so in their turn on down the line, for the delectation of us all. Where would we be if we couldn't steal from Sophocles, from Cervantes, from Sabatini, from Sayers, from Conan Doyle, from Heyer, from Austen, from Shakespeare (himself a champion "interpreter" of others' work)? We work by call and response, and we work well that way -- when we actually work.

The makers (they are not creators by any stretch) of League did not do, or at best did not make use of, the basic work that might have made this movie worthwhile.

There is no point in taking empty outlines, pasting onto them names remembered from movie versions of good books (so that people will have some idea who these ghosts are supposed to be), and moving them around by formula, like counters in a shoddy role-playing game. When you do that, you insult the originators of these fictional beings by diluting their creations down to nothing and putting them through meaningless contortions meant solely to stimulate bursts of pointless "excitement" in your modern audience.

Meanwhile, you insult your audience by throwing them old bones which they are supposed to be too stupid to notice are gnawed clean and flavorless. E.g. they are supposed to accept your empty suit of fancy clothes labeled "Captain Nemo" as the Captain Nemo created by Jules Verne.

Verne was captivated by the idea of a brilliant but bitter inventive genius living a secret life under the sea -- not, as in this movie, a cartoon Rajah who worships Kali (in full view of everybody until he notices a couple of gawkers and shuts the curtains) and runs a ship made of shiny molded plastic (which can apparently sail under tectonic plates, since it submerges outside Venice and resurfaces -- in a frozen lake in central Mongolia!). Your movie Nemo is a complete fraud. Moreover if your audience isn't aware of the original Captain Nemo, rich creation of a fine mind, you cheat them of the chance to know him. They will take your dreary bit of nonsense for the real thing and so steer away from what Verne wrote, and who could blame them?

This movie is also an insult to its actors, working people with talents which are given no scope whatever and who are made to look so frenetic and foolish that there isn't enough money in the world to pay them back for it. The responsible parties, whoever they may be in this case, have simply revealed their own intellectual poverty and their basic disrespect for great characters, truly creative authors, and movie-goers with any standards at all.

League is a lumpy, leaky, noisy bag of tired old tricks and imitative computer "art" that betrays everyone associated with it and leaves them all looking like helpless cretins. No doubt it cost a lot of money to make, and will recoup some of that money from people fooled by the advertising into going to see it.

Don't be one of them.

Or, in the words of the immortal sillies of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "Run away, run away!"

Copyright © 2003 by Suzy McKee Charnas