hey everyone, i just joined this forum today (this is only my second post
) and i thought i would kick things off by reviewing a movie i saw last night, TLXG. as you can porb tell from the subject line, this won't be a favorable review, for which i will give my reasons. also, IT WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS, so be warned.....
first of all, TLXG was originally a graphic novel that was based on a sort of justice league comprised of legendary characters from great literary works. the moviemakers took some artistic license, however, and changed some of the characters around. the movie character list is as follows:
Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) -- quatermain is a famous british hunter/adventurer from the book King Solomon's mines.
Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) -- nemo is, of course, the legendary sea captain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, who pilots the very cool submarine, the Nautilus
Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) -- harker was the bride of dracula in Bram Stroker's Dracula.
Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran) -- heres my first problem with the movie. apparently, rodney skinner is an invisible man who stole the invisibity potion from the original invisible man in H.G. Well's classic. the moviemakers just invented this guy because they couldn't get licensing rights to the real invisible man. whatever.
Dorian Gray (Stewart Townsend) -- from The Picture of Dorian Gray, this man stays forever young and immortal while a portrait of him ages and dies. can only be defeated if he looks at the portrait, which will reverse the magic
Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng) -- no introduction needed for this guy
Agent Tom Sawyer (Shane West) -- this is where i had one of my biggest beefs with the film. the comic book featured no american characters, so the moviemakers chose the most famous one to represent america, tom sawyer. apprently, Mar Twain's Missouri-bred trouble-maker is all grown up and a member of "the american secret service". am i the only one that finds that to be rediculous?
ok, so there are the characters. its a cool idea, but the plot is where the movie bit the big one. it starts out with a guy called 'M' recruiting TLXG to stop a madman (the Phantom) from waging a war on Europe. the league goes to venice to stop him only to find out that the Phantom is actually M himself, and the whole war thing was a ruse to steal the powers of the league. dorian gray was a traitor who was able to steal the powers of harker, jekyll, skinner, and the mechanical plans of the great ship, the nautilus, from cpt. nemo. so the league then goes the M' base in antartica (of all places) to stop him and get revenge on gray. while in antartica, M's TRUE identinty is revealed (yea, hes already had 2 identitys, why not throw in a third one). as in turns out, M is Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes's villainous fiend from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. anyway, the league kills moriarty, harker kills gray (in an act of vengeance. gray originally stole her "vampire power" by obtaining a blood sample while having sex with her. this pissed her off big time). however, quatermain dies at the end and tom sawyer assumes his role as the greatest adventurer in the world.
and that right there is two hours of a twisted, convulted, complex plot in a nutshell. so, it wasnt so much the idea was bad, it was simply the craptaculur story.
on a side note: i am a HUGE indiana jones fan, and am eagerly awaiting Indy 4 in 2005. while i was watching the movie i noticed a lot of indy references, two of which stuck out in my mind. 1) when the league travels to antartica, you see a map with a traveling red line tracing their route. this was lifted directly from indiana jones. and 2) dorian gray dies when harker shows him his picture. the portrait portrays a man who has been dead for many years, a rotten corpse, so gray ends up like that in matter of seconds. this scene was oddly similar to the last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Donovan drank from the wrong grail, got really old really fast, and died. i just thought those were two cool little snippets in which the movie was influenced by indy. anyway, theres my review. feel free to poat comments on what you guys thought about the movie