How Sean Connery Made The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) a Boys’ Own Blockbuster

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The casting of Sean Connery is everything. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Connery plays Allan Quatermain, the great hunter protagonist of H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, beginning with King Solomon’s Mines (1885). The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or LXG, as it was promoted, is based on the first volume of the comic book series of the same name, written by graphic novel luminary Alan Moore and drawn by Kevin O’Neill. The story brings together Quatermain and other famous figures from Victorian adventure, horror, and science fiction—including Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), the Invisible Man (Tony Curran), and a grown-up Tom Sawyer (Shane West)—to form a sort of proto-superhero team and stop a world war from breaking out.

Twenty plus years on, watching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen knowing that this is Sean Connery’s last screen performance adds a layer of significance to this always fun, sometimes silly boys’ own blockbuster. You need a legend to play a legend, and Connery provides Quatermain with assumed importance, such that we are excited to see him recruited to the team and we intuit the storied history of the character. (We saw a similar effect, albeit on a smaller scale, when Connery cameoed as Richard the Lionheart at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where the casting makes the character.) Even if Quatermain is meant to be a reluctant and cranky old man at the start of the film, we sense the hero Quatermain truly is because Connery is playing him. 

The casting of the man who was James Bond—not to mention Indiana Jones’s father, as well as numerous grey-bearded, scene-stealing supporting characters over the years—seems to have changed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in pre-production. It’s as if, by casting one of cinema's great heroic actors in the role of the great hunter, Allan Quatermain, the always subversive, sometimes insightful, and sometimes depraved aims of author Alan Moore just couldn’t be enacted. There is no cinematic universe where Sean Connery plays the emaciated, laudanum addict whose haunted sunken eyes dominate so many panels by Kevin O’Neill. And thus, unlike the comic books, the film becomes not a critique of these famous characters and their Victorian world, but rather a celebration of their imaginative impact and potential.

At this point, readers might wonder if I’ve jumped the shark. Sure, my flashback reviews to movies of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s often seek to rejig memories and popular perceptions (for example, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is actually a solid movie), but am I seriously trying to muster a critical re-evaluation of some mediocre-at-best, wannabe superhero franchise from 2003?

Yes, I am. But I’m not saying The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a great movie. I’m also not saying that it’s actually sophisticated art in some way. What has been generally overlooked, however, is that director Stephen Norrington (who also made the overlooked and underrated Blade in 1998, the first superhero movie with a black protagonist) crafted, with LXG, an entertaining, effective blockbuster, if we take it for what it wants to be—and not what Alan Moore wrote his comic book series to be, or what many graphic novel fans had hoped this film to be.

I was among those folks in 2003 somewhat disappointed with the changes and with what seemed a downgrade from serious comic book art into base-level blockbuster junk food. But as much as I still admire Watchmen, I’ve soured on aspects of Alan Moore’s work. I was so turned off by the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I didn’t read the series any further.

In contrast to Moore’s ambivalent critique in the comics, Norrington’s movie has such clear and uncomplicated affection for its characters. That’s what fundamentally sets the film apart from Moore’s purposes. In Moore’s version, similar to his approach in Watchmen to superheroes (who, importantly, each resemble more famous DC heroes), Moore wants us to see the familiar figures through a lens of critique and realism. The problem is that Moore’s vision of realism mostly consists of rape, cruelty, hypocrisy, and brute oppression. The basic idea is that these fantastical figures are products of the British Empire’s exploitative colonial systems and moral hypocrisy, as Moore sees it, and he’s just teasing out the sinister implications lurking in the original texts. It’s similar to how Game of Thrones is often viewed (erroneously, I would say) as a more realistic take on fantasy and medievalism. Sometimes, as with the masterful Watchmen, Moore achieves his critique, and so much more. Other times, Moore’s interests resemble all those episodes in Game of Thrones when Theon Greyjoy is tortured—episodes in which viewing corruption and despicable behaviour seems to become the point. 

In LXG, fun is the main point, and you can take it or leave it. I for one enjoy the cocktail mix of famous literary characters, with their humorous interactions and cheesy lines referencing a half dozen other famous works of literature. I admit, this is the boy’s version of The League, but the adults don’t always get it right, and they sometimes see the world through jaded eyes. In Norrington’s version, we get to enjoy the Invisible Man’s capabilities, and not just witness how creepy and awful an invisible man could become. (To be fair, Moore most likely takes the sinister nature of the Invisible Man from Wells' 1897 novel as his inspiration, as well as the 1933 Universal monster move. LXG addresses its change in character by calling the man Skinner and explaining that he stole the invisible elixir from the original.) In LXG, we get to see Mina Harker’s aftermath as a vampire warrior, like some kick-ass character out of Blade. Dorian Gray’s immortality becomes a super power and not just a curse. Nemo is a freedom fighter with Batman-level gadgets. It is especially amusing to see Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde morph into Dr. Bruce Banner/the Incredible Hulk, both being good doctors needing to control the lurking giants within them. The Hyde-Hulk connection is also a fun case of a character’s fictional descendent becoming the lens through which we picture the original. This superhero version of Jekyll and Hyde pulls on the tangled web of yarn that is science fiction and comic book intertextuality. 

One character addition underscores Norrington’s approach and its juvenile target audience: Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain returned to his precocious, mischievous boy hero in two later works that cast him in parodies of, first, adventure fiction (in 1894’s Tom Sawyer Abroad) and, second, detective fiction (in 1896’s Tom Sawyer, Detective). The film envisions a grown-up Tom Sawyer working for the United States Secret Service. This allows the film to bring in an American hero, clearly as an audience surrogate for young Americans. Sawyer gets to joke about Europeans and spar with the old man hunter, but Sawyer and Quatermain also develop a conventional son-father dynamic, which in my experience rewatching with my young boys, actually worked for them. The addition of Sawyer adds national and generational dynamics to the team. 

Admittedly, some of the references thrown into the movie are pure fancy. At one point, Nemo’s first mate says, “Call me Ishmael.” Why? So that we think of Moby Dick. Nothing more. This movie’s not literate and sophisticated. It’s not a nuanced reading of Victorian fiction or colonial power (and neither is Moore’s comic book, really). But it is the kind of movie that might lure a kid in 2003 or 2024, who never reads old books, to think that maybe they should crack open Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I don’t see such references as vapid, but rather as directional, pointing us to the world, and web, of imaginative works. The movie wants to tap into currents of the imagination, many of which these characters and their works originated. Furthermore, the film’s emphasis on adventure is actually a push away from Moore’s revisionary reimagining and back towards the adventure that dominates Haggard’s novel and which is found in threads in the other novels.  

Norrington’s production is sometimes visually striking and the action scenes are mostly enjoyable. Norrington adds some gothic flair to certain visuals. I particularly enjoyed the repetition of the camera’s vertical descent through the layers of the cities for establishing shots, making Victorian London and fin-de-siècle Paris look like dystopian metropolises. The map effect, with the camera zooming into locations, is also fun, and recalls Indiana Jones.

Sometimes, however, the design is flawed. Hyde looks grotesque, with enormous arms, even if the design seems to be following O’Neill’s illustrations. Perhaps it is also useful at making us inherently dislike Hyde’s appearance and not just see a flesh-coloured imitation of heroes like the Hulk or the Thing. The size of the Nautilus seems to range from submarine to battleship to aircraft carrier. In a way, though, the ship’s nonsensical proportions are almost charming, functioning like the pliable, expedient imagination of a small child.

At one point, however, the film’s design and execution go off the rails. The insanity in Venice is still too much for me. (Roger Ebert was right to call it out, but wrong to think it summed up the whole movie.) In the sequence, which takes place in the middle of the film, several characters race Nemo’s luxury car around Venice, shooting bad guys along the way, in order to shoot a flare from a certain location which will somehow invite a tracking rocket from Nemo’s submarine to impact at the precise location, causing an explosion, that will stop the domino of explosions . . . I guess? None of it makes much sense, conceptually it’s beyond improbable—the Nautilus could never navigate Venetian canals—and it looks messy, like all the dust and smoke and speed are masking the CGI’s limited capabilities. The sequence in Venice is really just too stupid and poorly done to make this a wholly good movie.

But then we get some themes and imagery that work so perfectly. Stopping World War I is a classic adventure subject, going back to early spy novels like The Riddle of the Sands (1903) or The 39 Steps (1915), and it evokes true yearning for anyone with a sense of history. What if we could stop that war? I also like the giant factory hidden among the frozen Mongolian lakes and mountains where the Bondian archvillain has his lair. Can I even remember the lair of most baddies these days? It might be silly, but it’s silly like the best lairs in James Bond movies. 

Aspects of LXG also make me look back fondly at some of the unrealized potential in the fantasy boom of the early 2000s. Remember 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? That was a movie that was stilted and wooden and yet also so imaginative and evocative, with its referential imagery—but which also helped set the framework for greenscreen blockbusters and deep-fake dead actors. Still, I wish we had gotten a sequel to that film or this one, and not another reboot of another superhero I like. At the same time, LXG embodies some of the visual messiness and narrative chaos that characterize 21st-century blockbusters since its release (in distinct contrast to those of the 80s and 90s).

To conclude, however, let’s return to the central issue of adaptation and the question of what exactly LXG is trying to do as a movie. If The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen achieves value as a blockbuster for boys by jettisoning the core themes of Moore’s comic book, it’s worth asking why the filmmakers chose to adapt Moore’s comic book in the first place? Couldn’t you just make your own adaptation of public domain Victorian figures? While I agree that, as a blockbuster, the film raises concerns about the cynical exploitation of IP for commercial purposes (a feature of blockbusters that has plagued us for a long time), I think we need to separate concept from execution to understand the film. Stephen Norrington and the screenwriter James Robinson seem to think that Moore’s core idea, of taking these famous characters and making a superhero team out of them, is a great idea. Where to go with that idea is another matter, and the filmmakers choose to take that idea in a different direction in terms of narrative, tone, and theme. In the end, for all the haters, I would ask: isn’t there room enough in the world for both a cunning critique of famous Victorian literary figures, as well as a fun smash-up superhero action movie featuring them? Adopting Moore’s approach would also eliminate the movie’s ability to be a blockbuster for family audiences; I don’t think the changes were a bad choice for a summer movie, especially when there is so much action-adventure potential in the core idea. And when Sean Connery is leading the team of adventurers, it’s well worth the watch.

Given that Connery died in 2020, the proto-Marvel-teaser final shots also gain a far greater emotional resonance when viewed today. Our desire to see Connery on screen once again is stirred up by the final image, which teases that Quatermain will never really die so long as he is in Africa. There’s a poignancy to that final image, enhanced by its hanging quality. We wait for the sequel that will never be. 

Directed by Stephen Norrington; screenplay by James Robinson, based on the comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill; starring Sean Connery, Stuart Townsend, Peta Wilson, Jason Flemyng, Naseeruddin Shah, Tony Curran, Shane West, Richard Roxburgh.

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