The Movie FROM HELL

A Review of Twentieth Century Fox's Movie Adaptation of FROM HELL
by Bala Menon

FROM HELL, the movie, tells the tale of the Ripper murders, from the point of view of Inspector Abberline, a policeman who gets oracular visions which help him track down the killer. Unlike Abberline, however, the people behind this film seem to suffer from a staggering lack of vision. This movie manages to combine the intellectual depth of a Harlequin romance with the subtle, understated elegance of a sledgehammer to the head. Hollywood must be very sure that its target audience for this film consists of cretins, since it spells out everything in heavy, unambivalent terms. Good is good, bad is bad, and never the gray shall be.

The characters quickly devolve into a bunch of cliches, with little or nothing to give them their own voice. Abberline, the good, kind, always politically correct policeman, doggedly tracking down the murderer against all odds. Godley, the sergeant who's unswervingly loyal to his officer. Mary Kelly, the hooker with the heart of gold. The brutal London mob. The supercilious, class-conscious elite. Single-note stereotypes, all. Horror is depicted more by the addition of copious gore rather than any acting performance; subtlety is well and truly disposed of, as far as this film's concerned. The players are reduced to solid black and clear-cut white, eliminating any silly, distracting hues of gray.

On the flip side, it does have some beautiful imagery; one particularly striking one was the Ripper's grapes, which (in Abberline's visions) begin pulsating, like the beating of several hearts. The settings are well-constructed, and the lighting effects excellent. The cinematography is, in fact, deserving of a much better plot than it's been dealt; the result being a movie that comes across as all style and no substance. There are also some decent acting performances from Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane and Johnny Depp, working as best they can within the limits of the roles dealt them. However, if plot or characterization are of much consideration, then this movie probably isn't for you.

Viewed as a stand-alone movie, it's a hideously unsubtle plot, bolstered by some very pretty imagery. As an adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, however, it fails colossally. In adaptations of books to cinema, it's not unusual to have some elements dropped, and others added, as the tale transitions between the two media. Here, however, the film alters its standpoint considerably, converting an elegant construct to a gory slasher movie; and the elements of the book that did make it in stand out as garish, incongruous additions to the mix. they make little or no overall sense with regard to the theme of the film.

"If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third." - Anton Chekhov

This adaptation suffers badly from trying to desperately squeeze in cool points of the original book, without necessarily seeing if it fits into the new framework of the film. Take the case of John Merrick, the Elephant Man. His appearance in the book served to further heighten the hellishness of that London and further, he served as a faux-Ganesha to mark an auspicious beginning to Gull's endeavours. In the film, his appearance serves no purpose beyond consuming a minute's worth of celluloid; aside from having appeared in the book, the sequence is an absolutely worthless appendage to the structure of the film.

The sole redeeming factor to this movie is that it will hopefully have added to the bank accounts of Mr. Moore and Campbell, and encourage them to produce more of their excellent work. By itself, however, it fails on almost every level save an example of "there-but-for-the-Grace-of-God-go-I".

Review (c) Bala Menon , 2001