Movies - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (film)

	Movies - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a 2003 film adaption of the comic book limited series.

The film stars Sean Connery, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Naseeruddin Shah, Richard Roxburgh, Jason Flemyng and Shane West. It is directed by Stephen Norrington and was released on July 11, 2003 in the United States.

The following characters are added to the comics version: Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, as well as a new villain.

The Tom Sawyer character is taken from the novels by Mark Twain. It is rather anachronistical for Sawyer to appear as a young man in the film since although Twain published a Tom Sawyer, Detective story in 1896, the story was set in pre-Civil War 1840s. In the film he is an American secret service agent sent by Teddy Roosevelt).

As well, characters from the comic are altered as follows:

Allan Quatermain is the leader of the team and is not recovering from an opium addiction as he is in the comic.
Mina Murray is still Mina Harker, no longer the leader, and a vampire; here Jonathan Harker has been dead for years, although it's unknown whether he died at Dracula's hands or if he was killed by his wife's vampiric instincts.
The Invisible Man is a new version of the character known as Rodney Skinner, a thief who has stolen the invisibility formula. The film-makers were unable to obtain the rights to H. G. Wells' original Invisible Man character. While Dr. Hawley Griffin from the comic is a sociopath and a rapist, Rodney Skinner is merely mischievous.
Jekyll and Hyde appear, but they are also portrayed in a more favourable light in the film than they are in the comic and Jekyll still needs his potion to turn into Hyde.
In the graphic novels it is suggested that Dorian Gray is a member of the previous league and not a villain.

In a move reminiscent of the James Bond novels, the League is recruited by a character known as "M". Moriarty from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories also makes an appearance, as does a character referred to as the "Fantom" who resembles the Phantom of the Opera or French master villain Fantômas. The character of Campion Bond was supposed to appear (one media report suggested that he would be played by Roger Moore, thereby having two former James Bonds in one movie), but the character was dropped before filming began. It seems also that Auguste Dupin (a character created by Edgar Allan Poe) is also missing from the cast; the scene he would have been in was completely simplified.

Originally cast as Mina Murray-Harker, Monica Bellucci had to withdraw from the project due to production overruns on Tears of the Sun
. This would have been the second time Bellucci would have played a "bride" of Dracula (the first being Bram Stoker's Dracula).

The film met with criticism, as many fans felt that the complex, highly literary storyline had been oversimplified to create a basic action flick to appeal to the general public.

This film is not to be confused with the film of The League of Gentlemen
, which was a 1960 British heist film.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (film) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (film); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay