I think the most important thing to say about this movie, having read other reviews, is this: it's not based on the original graphic novel. What they have effectively done is bought the rights to the name and the idea of assembling a league of fictional C19 adventurers. Beyond that, forget Alan Moore. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing in itself. There are deeper themes to this film if one is prepared to look- the political struggles in Europe, for instance. The influence that C19 characters had on our modern heroes. And the design and mood of the film captures the sense of a fin-de-siecle world on the brink of collapse well. The basic plot is not bad for a popcorn film. It's a shame, then, that these deeper themes are hidden beneath layers of rubbish. The characters are wooden and the dialogue terrible. One of the joys of the original graphic novel was spotting subtle literary references- the equivalent in this movie is to have Sean Connery comment that while he arrived quickly, Phileas Fogg would have been quicker (just in case you don't get the reference, he then adds that said character circumnavigated the globe in 80 days). The fictional heroes offer the potential for some amazing character interaction, but become standard Hollywood archetypes- the tough old guy, the devil-may-care young buck, the cheeky cockney and so forth. With a better script, this could have been fantastic. Shame it didn't have one.
