The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
I first saw the movie premier when the movie was released in 2003, then saw it a couple of times of TV – including a couple of days ago. I even bought the DVD. I must say I never get bored of the movie; the story is just amazing and the production great.
The movie, written by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neal, two famous comic books authors, features all-time favorite adventure, fantasy and horror characters:
- Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), the hunter
- Tom Sawyer (Shane West) , the adventurer
- Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), pirate and captain of the ocean jewel the Nautilus
- Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), surviving victim of Dracula
- Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), the invisible man
- Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), the ageless
- Dr. Henry Jekyll and his brutish ego Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng)
At first sight, all those characters fitting in one movie can seem too crowded, but actually the mixture makes the movie a success. The least we could say is that the production was able to define a plausible storyline where everyone can fit without making the movie too crowded or too boring.
The plot: London 1899 - A criminal mastermind, only known as “The Phantom”, plots to start a world war on the planet. The British Empire forms a group of seven individuals (mentioned above), each one characterized by unique skills, known as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen whose goal is to stop “The Phantom”, unveil his criminal plans and rescue the world from a total annihilation war – well I’m exaggerating a bit.
Some free ebooks (or etexts) related to the movie I found (on Project Gutenberg, an amazing e-library of free ebooks) along the way:
- King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
- The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson