This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Mr Wednesday: If anyone has a way of writing about Orlando better than the clumsy "s/he" thing I've used please replace it by all means.
Looney Toons: Mina Murray married Jonathan Harker to become Mina Harker, so her birth ("Nee") name is Murray, not the other way around. This makes the text in her entry about names after divorce a little odd, but I'm not familiar with League so I don't know whose error it is. For documentation, see this Wikipedia article
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BT The P: See, I thought the usage on Nee was as a synonym for "was". She, in a very un-Victorian move, changed her name back after the divorce. I'll clarify it.
Looney Toons: Cool. Just for reference, Nee is the feminine past participle form of the verb naître (to be born), so you can see how that's really supposed to work.
Drive By Editor: Pulled this, an edit introduced by Robin Adams— "Oh, and they'd have brought in Tom Sawyer, so that it would be safe for Americans to watch."
The whole snarking that Americans had to have Tom Sawyer added to the movie just to make it "safer" for them to watch is an unwarranted Take That!. Especially since, the way he worded it, he implied everything else that makes the movie a Dis Continuity was added just to make it palatable to Americans.
While the creators of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen may be British, they were members of Wildstorm Comics when they made the series. Wildstorm is an American company (currently owned by DC Comics, another American company) that published the series as part of their America's Best Comics line. In fact, so far as I know, there were problems exporting the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's third volume because of copyright issues outside the United States. So, the movie adaption of a series produced in America had to be made safer for Americans to watch? I call shenanigans.
So, uh, yeah. Robin Adams sneering that the movie had to have Tom Sawyer just to make it "safer" for those xenophobic Americans to watch? Not buying it. I've removed his Take That! and left everything else alone.
Daibhid C: Perhaps over-charitably, I read that as suggesting the clueless film execs believed it needed an American character, not that it actually did need one. Like the line Douglas Adams had about selling Hitchhiker's in America: "One is told at every level of the American entertainment industry that the audience does not like or understand English humour. One is told this at every level except the audience itself who, so far as I can tell, seem to love it."
Lady Norbert: Why so much hatred for the movie, anyway? I loved the movie. Also, pulling the phrase "starring Sean Connery, Jason Flemyng, and some jerks" because that's just rude. Particularly to Nasseeruddin Shah (Nemo), who is a celebrated Indian actor.
Caswin: Completely disregarding the source material and taking it at face value, since I was barely aware of the comics at the time, I thought it was good.
Mr Wednesday: Not knowing of the existence of the comics and being twelve years old, I still thought it was a piece of shit. It was critically lambasted as well, so this is the general consensus...
Rebochan: I pulled an insanely long string of natter that was nothing but making excuses for the movie based on one person's opinion. Seriously, what was *that* all about? Reproduced in its insane glory here.
- Adaptation Decay — Even such fans as the movie has (including the person writing this sentence) can't deny the massive thematic scaling-back it got.
- Though it does come across as a massive case of Executive Meddling, many of the film's changes are somewhat less arbitrary than is normally implied by the term. From a producer's viewpoint, the numerous changes are all in fact quite ruthlessly logical and sequential:
- When you're lucky enough to get Sean Connery (and committed to paying him the salary his A-list status merits, because he's going to be one of your biggest draws for the non-comic-fan audience), you put him in the lead role, not a supporting role.
- Once you've got Connery in that leading role, the character of Quatermain requires a few modifications. Obviously, he can't be an opium addict any more because you don't have screen time to waste on detoxifying him, or on recapturing the audience sympathy that would have been blown by first finding him like that. However, once he's no longer an addict, he's no longer believable (either as a character or as a Connery role) as second-in-command only, and takes the role of Badass Normal and team leader that, in the comic, Mina fulfilled.
- With Quatermain displacing Mina as obvious leader of the League, Mina's role in the story has to change as well, and the tremendous strength of personality that was, in the comic, her only "power" can't take the centre stage often enough to make the impact it needs — bearing in mind again the limits of screen time vs. comic-book page. So to give Mina the opportunity for some spectacle in a way that wouldn't require an entire scene to build up and discharge, she was given primarily visual and physical abilities rather than dramatic emotional ones; namely, she became a full-on vampire. (Though she appears to have some forensic scientific ability as well, as shown aboard the Nautilus in one scene.)
- Mina's change in role also explains in part the presence of both Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer as characters, both of whom allow the presence of romantic tension without the Unfortunate Implications of the comic's original Quatermain-Mina hookups.
- Sawyer also fulfills two other vital elements in the film, one dramatic and one marketing: as the youngest character, he adds the dramatic element of a son-/student-figure to Quatermain, giving Quatermain a close emotional connection, and as the only American character he provides a strong hook for the American audience, which is a market too large for any sensible film producer to ignore — no matter how much it feels like an unnecessary intrusion.
- The change from Hawley Griffin to Rodney Skinner, by contrast, was driven more by legal caution than production stricture or dramatic convenience: unlike the character in Wells' book, the film character of Griffin is not in the public domain and is still owned by the original studio producers of The Invisible Man. It was simply easier and legally safer to create a different character rather than try obtaining permission for use of the original IP. (This did, however, offer one useful dramatic opportunity: Skinner served as a useful red herring for all those viewers who'd read the comic and were expecting the Invisible Man to be the traitor.)
- Though it does come across as a massive case of Executive Meddling, many of the film's changes are somewhat less arbitrary than is normally implied by the term. From a producer's viewpoint, the numerous changes are all in fact quite ruthlessly logical and sequential:
