I don’t like talking about the movie adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen more than absolutely necessary, since one can say without exaggeration that it is one of the worst things to ever befall humanity. If nothing else, it holds the record for distance between quality of source material and quality of adaptation. But now there’s talk of a new movie version, and I’m (very) cautiously optimistic, if only because if it is relatively successful it might bump the current hideous abomination from occasionally taking up valuable TV time on Saturday afternoons, like the way the new Fantastic Four movie will … okay, bad example. Okay, like how the more recent Judge Dredd movie bumped that horrible Sylvester Stallone thing where he refused to wear the helmet, or the various more recent Batman movies bumped the various older Batman movies.
But here’s the thing. Everyone is very excited about the quote from John Davis, producer of said movie, where he says it’s going to be more “female-centric”. This has, of course, made the sort of people who shriek about Ghostbusters remakes flip out, because argle-bargle PC blah blah, and other people to get all excited about John Davis’s creativity and bravery. All these people are jerks, because they are either opining about something they don’t know about, or like the author of that very article I linked to, seem to have not absorbed anything of what they read. Or what John Davis said.
Because Davis’s whole point is that being more faithful to the source material, it will end up being more female-centric. This is because unlike the movie, which had Alan Quatermain leading the group because someone got Sean Connery to play him (and Sean fucking Connery can’t play a semi-decrepit opium addict who needs help to find his way back to being useful, oh no), in the graphic novel, Mina Harker was the one who recruited the team of sociopaths and held them together (for a while). Of course in the movie, Mina had to be changed into a generic leather-clad spinny killbot ™ who, as I recall, had no lines. She got off easy compared to the treatment of Mr Hyde, but let’s not get into that.
See? Right there in the center
Anyway, can we just all agree that no one who hasn’t read the Alan Moore graphic novel is allowed to talk about this subject anymore? Great, thanks.
