Karen and I finally saw League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Spoilers hereunder, you have been warned. Maybe I should implement 'cuts' like LiveJournal has. Eh, but not tonight.

Judging from Karen's question after the movie, I was not alone in wondering why Alan Quatermain was selected by 'M' for the League. (Or 'Quartermain', judging from the spelling on the grave marker.) He had no supernatural powers or chemical formulæ to be stolen or copied; there was no reason whatsoever (that I could see) for 'M' to recruit him at all.

From Gamera_Spinning, I now know that the reason given in the movie had nothing to do with the original comic, and — from the Alan Moore interview listed in his weblog entry — that Tom Sawyer was added for the American audience. (Out of all American fiction, they couldn't find any character more appropriate than a kid best known for floating downriver on a raft?!)

It wasn't much of a mystery who "The Phantom" was. We got a nice long closeup of the Masonic ring on The Phantom's finger, and it was hard not to notice that the doors of M's London meeting-room were covered with the square-and-compasses. Could it have been any more blatant? I'm going to have to get me a copy of Alan Moore's comic and confirm my assumption that the original wasn't that amateurish.

Not really too sure about the whole collapsing-Venice thing, either. Let's see, a bomb blowing up causes a domino effect which will destroy the entire city, and blowing up one single building before the radius of destruction reaches it will act like a firebreak and halt the entire process? What about the buildings elsewhere on the radius? And if the whole city's supposed to be destroyed, why are The Phantom's men suicidally lining the rooftops of the doomed buildings? Where in Venice are there streets that long? What metal is the Nautilus made of, if it can survive stone buildings falling on it? And how on earth did Tom Sawyer escape being killed by Nemo's SCUD missile, since two seconds before it the building, he was still trapped under Nemo's "auto-mobile"? There's only so much disbelief I can suspend, and that sequence just went way too far over my limit.

Though they started pushing my limit right at the beginning, with what appeared to be World War II-era German uniforms in 1899. I guess they figured the audiences wouldn't recognize them as Germans otherwise.