It might be a league of extraordinary men...

[sessifet]

...but it is not an extraordinary film. It's neither astonishingly bad, nor astonishingly good. It's an enjoyable movie, provided you suspend disbelief by the neck until deaddeaddead. Which I did, and therefore I enjoyed myself.

Just one slight peeve:

Book-Nautilus. Nemo's ship. Sleek, stealthy bugger, very luxurious inside. At least that's what I always imagined when I read "20,000 Leagues".

Movie-Nautilus: beautiful artwork, both exterior and interior. All very pretty. And also completely stupid. This was supposed to be a fairly secret mission. Now, Nautilus is a submarine. Which should mean the aforementioned stealthy sleek bugger. But what do we get? We get a baroque (or maybe rococo) version of the Brittanic. In exquisite detail. Seriously, 90% of the screen time Nautilus gets is of her on the surface. Now in my book, stealth does not mean popping up to the surface so Allan Quatermain can shoot clay pigeons. (Also: fiddly details? Not so good for aerodynamic flow.)

And the other thing: Nautilus is meant to be big. Looking at the film, she's easily 500 yards long, probably more. And what do they do with her? They breeze into Venice with her! You know, Venice? The watery city of the narrow waterways with lots of low bridges and corners? And they sail this big fuck-off ship in there! How the bloody hell is she supposed to turn corners? Teleportation?

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

"Now, Nautilus is a submarine. Which should mean the aforementioned stealthy sleek bugger"

I'm not entirely sold on this. Early submarines tended to be a ship with the hatches caulked really tight - they still had plenty of straight edges, deck equipment, handrails, so on and so forth... baroque ornamentation might well not have seemed quite so silly.

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

My main complaint wasn't the ship, which despite all the impracticalities was very pretty. It was Mina.

Book-Mina: Strong woman who knows what she wants and gets it, with vague hints of traumatic incidents in her past, and in absolutely every sense the leader.

Movie-Mina: LOOK! VAMPIRE! And not so much playing second fiddle to Quatermain as double bass.

My favourite character was Dorian Grey, who wasn't even in the book and therefore couldn't be utterly unlike he was supposed to be.

[ahruman.livejournal.com]

Unless of course you’ve read the original book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray), as with Sessi’s having read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_Under_the_Sea). :-)