LXG

I just watched League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for the first time. As you may have surmised, it wasn't high on my priority list.
Good movie, if you don't watch the last half hour.

I was with them right up until the end, then my faith in the writing just fell apart. Hell, the writing just fell apart. There were some oddities before that, like Mina's inexplicable tolerance for sunlight. I mean, what are the three things everyone knows about vampires? Suck blood, hate garlic, killed by sunlight or stake. With her science I'm sure she'd have been able to whip up some sunblock, but it would have been nice to have it explicitly stated. Note: Being in Venice would have been a lovely time for Tom to offer to take her out for Italian food after they save the city. Oops.

I kept waiting for the scene where Quartermain borrowed Tom Sawyer's style and filled the air with flying lead. You know, the scene where he faces off against the Invisible Man's evil duplicate, so his "one shot" style doesn't work. Presumably this would take place just after he sees the reflection in the Phantom mask of Tom struggling with the invisible assassin, and shoots a hanging object so it swings down to hit the invisible guy. Of course, that guy sees it coming and leaps out of the way, leaving Tom to get smacked by it. Quartermain can't see his target, so he has to rely on luck instead of skill. Meanwhile, Moriarty escapes. I'm sure you could work in Quartermain's mortal wound somehow. The way it was shot, you could barely even SEE the evil Invisible Man behind Tom. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of this statement.)

The real Invisible Man catching fire seemed like a strange scene with no real point. He should have either been swathed in bandages at the funeral (a la the '30s Invisible Man movie) or else had his invisibility ruined by the scarring, as was suggested by his most severe burns being visible.

The fight between Mina and Dorian was just a little 'off'. Not bad, and the spiking-him-to-the-wall thing was very refreshing, but her line about breaking her heart wasn't as good as it could have been. I'd have played off the vampire thing again.

Copy-Hyde's end was... lacking. There was a bunch of hints like "Not the whole thing!" and "He's burning through elixir at an accelerated rate", but they never really... WENT anywhere with it. My take is this: The more you drink, the more you hulk out, but the quicker it ends. Hyde's advantage was that he retained more of his intellect, so he'd be able to outthink the berserker copy-Hyde. Ultimately, though, the end of the fight should have been that the bombs go off and Nemo and Hyde escape through the hole in the wall. The roof collapses. Then, just as they relax, copy-Hyde emerges from the rubble, lifting a huge chunk of stone! Just before he hurls it, he runs out of elixir and reverts to a normal man, who is then crushed by the boulder.

I've noticed that, having watched a movie, I can frequently come up with ways that key scenes could have increased the tension, pathos, or logic with mere minutes of thought. I must conclude that movie writers are, for the most part, retarded. I realize it's harder to visualize in a script, but we're talking about scenes that were hinted at before and whose loss was greatly felt. Did they just run out of money??