Movie Review!
(I swear I didn't mean to write so much... this movie was just so bad.)
I'd also like to point out that I didn't realize until I posted this that there were two other reviews before mine. I swear.
X-Men: The Last Stand
(Let's hope...)
I am lj-cutting this, because there will be spoilers. If you are averse to spoilers, I suggest you see the movie first.
I have been thinking about writing a review for this movie since I saw it on opening night, and I have decided against it -- until now, of course -- because I am not quite sure where to begin. Do I start with the poor character development? The erratic, downward-spiraling plot? The tragic rethinking of the (Dark) Phoenix? Or the killer special effects? To be honest, I'm still not sure, so we'll see how this goes.
Let's begin with plot. Here is a quick summary: Warren Worthington II, whose son is a mutant, freaked out long, long ago and, since he's rich, spent his life and money trying to find a "cure" for the mutant gene. Luckily, he found Leech, a mutant whose ability is to hinder mutant powers and whose curse is his body produces an antibody to the mutant-X gene. So, there's a bunch of scared humans trying to cure this genetic difference, a bunch of people who suffer from that genetic difference who get pissed off, and a few other genetically-different chicos and chicas who don't really care either way, as long as nobody gets hurt. Mayhem ensues. There is also a girl (Anna Paquin) who really wants to have sex, a woman (Famke Janssen) who has recently become schizophrenic, and a man (Hugh Jackman) whose James Dean complex has become too much even for him to handle. Oh, there's also a bunch of third-rate ragtag mutants who are trying to make it in the world and start hanging out with the wrong crowd, a guy (James Marsden) whose taken the brooding-over-dead-loved-ones thing to a whole new level, and a man (Kelsey Grammar) who is torn between his politics and his genetics. And a man (Ian McKellan) who can't see love when it's smacking him in the face, another man (Patrick Stewart) who seriously needs to take off his rose-tinted goggles, and a woman (Rebecca Romijn) who is never as sad as when she stopped being blue. Oh, and of course, there's another guy (Ben Foster) who has some issues accepting who he is, genetically-speaking.
No, I am not exaggerating. All of this -- and more! -- happens in the movie. Individually, none of these plots seems too heinous or sparse or problematic, but when you shove all of them -- and more! -- into a movie that's under two hours, things begin to go a bit haywire. Certainly, the plot hinges around this so-called "mutant cure," but it veers off so often from that track that you begin to wonder if it were ever on it to begin with. I found myself craving more depth in some of the side plots -- notably the bit with Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Rogue (Anna Paquin), and Shadowcat (Ellen Page) -- and less "depth" (I use the term relatively) in some of the other ones. The movie ends with most of the side plots left open; indeed, by the end of the movie and after the near-Armageddon attempted by the Dark Phoenix, you are not even sure whether certain characters survived. Basically, what I am saying is that the movie felt like a teaser-trailer for about fifteen OTHER movies interspersed with one short allegory about the homosexual agenda.
That's the other thing, the one thing that amused me throughout most of the movie. In X2, I picked up on the obvious parallels between being a mutant and being a homosexual. (Yes, I'm gay, and yes, that's probably partly why I'm so quick to tie things to sexuality.) Here, in X3, with all this talk of "curing" the mutants and the mutants insisting that there is nothing to cure, yadda yadda yadda, the parallels are explicitly made. Yet... are they? Being gay threatens nobody; there are no gay men walking around ripping the Golden Gate Bridge from its hinges and using it as a weapon of mass destruction. There are no lesbians running around causing amok with the weather. The humans in the movie have a very valid right to be afraid of mutants, a very valid right to wish them controlled or contained or monitored. Here, in real life, heterosexuals have no reason to fear homosexuals; the most we are going to do is redecorate your living room and tell you how truly god-awful your fashion sense is. So, while I appreciate the parallel and the attempt to make people realize how freaking ridiculous "curing" homosexuality is, the parallels aren't exactly... well... parallel.
So, we have a bunch of normal humans trying to eradicate mutant-humans, and one of the mutant humans, Magneto (Ian McKellan), gets a bit pissed. He's the movie's bad guy, but throughout the whole damn thing, I found myself rallying with him more than with the X-Men. Sure, I don't know if I would opt for genocide of the genetically-normal population like he does, but I sure as Hell wouldn't want to sit around and let myself be "cured," which is what Professor X and his crew would have done, had Magneto not interrupted them with his Golden Gate Bridge maneuver. This, of course, points to another problem with the movie: character development. Or the lack thereof.
Now, action movies are never really about the characters. You do not go to an action movie and expect to be absorbed into the life of the star, to leave feeling as if you and Action Star are best friends who have known each other since you were knee-high to a newt, but you do, at least, want a bit of depth to the movie's cast. At least, I do, and (one of) the problem(s) with X3 is an excruciatingly palpable lack of this depth. Let's face it, folks: a puddle in the Sahara is deeper than these X-Men. I don't know if these movies are suffering from the same flaws of John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Satan is the star, but the supervillains in X3 are much, much more enticing than the superheroes. As I already said, I identify most with Magneto and I found myself hoping against hope that he may win. His motivation, the impetus behind his actions, is clear; when he speaks and acts, he does so with passion, with force, with point. The superheroes seem to act simply to counter Magneto and his cronies. Even when the heroes do something unrelated to the mutant cure -- Cyclops's brief scenes of near-silent brooding, Wolverine's melodramatic (and ludicrous) attempts at remaining removed and then, even worse!, his attempts at showing affection -- they just seem... stock. The one true moment of passion, the one true instance of character development, is right after -- SPOILER ALERT -- Mystique is struck with the cure and reverts to normal-human status. She lies on the floor, writhing, as her skin turns peach and her hair turns brown, and Magneto abandons her, says "I'm sorry, my dear, you're one of them now," and a single tear rolls down the non-human Mystique's face. At this moment, you realize she truly loves Magneto, and not because of his magnetic (har har, a pun!) personality. Of course, you quickly realize that she is quite possibly the only person in the entire movie to feel anything, but...
Now, again, part of the problem with the characters is the same as part of the problem with the plot -- there's just too many! The highlight of my night was coming home after the movie, going on to IMDB, and reading the cast list and seeing how many of the mutants listed I could remember seeing in the movie. There are more characters than there are subplots, and it's nigh impossible to develop anyone's personality when they have a total of five minutes screen time. They had to kill off or demutate about three or four characters before the movie even got rolling because there were just too many new people to handle.
As if that weren't enough, some of the attempted character development just seems... weird. Rogue would never give up her powers willingly. Beast would never suggest that Professor X's school should close down. Storm would never be so... perky. Basically, all the characters were as flat as the glass on a mirror. Every now and then, it felt as if one of the characters were trying to turn themselves three-dimensional, trying to come out of the flat plane of the mirror's surface, only to find that they came out with the wrong reflection.
And finally -- and this is my last point, I promise -- what the HELL did they do to my poor Phoenix?! In the comics, the Phoenix began simply as Jean Grey's achieving maximum use of her mutant powers. Later, when the comics wanted Jean Grey (who had committed suicide in the original storyline) to return, they went back and changed things a bit -- they invented a cosmic entity known as the Phoenix Force that had created a duplicate of Jean Grey, possessed that duplicate, and stored the original Jean Grey, now comatose, at the bottom of the ocean. Now, in the original storyline, before the advent of this duplicate Jean Grey Phoenix Force crap, Jean Grey slowly goes insane due to her absolute power (absolute power corrupts absolutely, bleh bleh bleh), but in the movie, Jean needed to go freaky a lot faster than that, so they changed the whole story. In X3, the Phoenix is some subconscious part of Jean Grey, some alter-ego that controls (or is controlled by) Jean Grey's unlocked psychic potential, a schizoidal identity that had been locked by Professor X... until X2, when we began to see signs of its release. In the movie, the now-released Phoenix basically controls Jean Grey, and the Phoenix is not very happy about having been kept captive all these years. The result of all these changes is this: the Phoenix's (and, consequently, Jean Grey's) main role in the movie is to stand around, with badly-dyed Kool-Aid-red hair, and look confused and dimwitted, with the occasional temper tantrum which inevitably results in the flaying off of skin of some major mutant, like (SPOILER) Cyclops and Professor X. This is not the Phoenix of the comics, this is not the Phoenix of the 1990's animated series, this is not the Phoenix I know and love, this is not the Phoenix I expected after I saw X2, and this is my single biggest gripe with the movie. You cannot mess with my Phoenix and live to tell about it.
To be honest -- and I don't know how "true" this is -- what happened is it seems that X2's director and writers saw a direction for the sequel -- the Phoenix saga -- but X3's director and writers didn't like it, so they changed gears to what they wanted -- the mutant cure. The problem, of course, is that X2 laid far too many hints of the burgeoning Phoenix in Jean Grey and consequently incited far too many fans to expect her arrival in X3, so the third movie had to do something with the character. I am not all too familiar with the original comics -- there may in fact be a storyline in them regarding the mutant cure plot -- but it is not tied with the Phoenix saga, and it should not have been connected in this movie. It was a bad idea, with a bad result. Great special effects, but nevertheless, a bad result.
Oh, one other thing really annoyed me. (SPOILER ALERT!) The movie spent two hours, basically, killing off characters like Professor X and stripping others, like Magneto, Rogue, and Mystique, of their powers only to pull back at the end. Are Magneto's powers returning? Did Professor X transport his consciousness into the body of the comatose victim who made a really, really awkward and out-of-place-until-the-very-end cameo in the beginning of the movie? The world may never know. Basically, they ended the movie in the same way you are NEVER EVER supposed to end a short story -- by saying, "It was all a dream."
If anything, the one thing I learned from X3 is this: there are some stories (and some movies) that are better left in your imagination. In my head, X3 was going to be miraculous, and in my head, X3 and the Phoenix still are. X-Men: That Last Stand threatened that, but luckily, I am great at ignoring things in reality that I don't like.
Grade: C-
Grade Breakdown
Plot: D, C, D, D, C, C, B-, C
Characters: B- (redeemed via Mystique and Magneto)
Special Effects: A+
Adaptation:
I'd also like to point out that I didn't realize until I posted this that there were two other reviews before mine. I swear.
X-Men: The Last Stand
(Let's hope...)
I am lj-cutting this, because there will be spoilers. If you are averse to spoilers, I suggest you see the movie first.
I have been thinking about writing a review for this movie since I saw it on opening night, and I have decided against it -- until now, of course -- because I am not quite sure where to begin. Do I start with the poor character development? The erratic, downward-spiraling plot? The tragic rethinking of the (Dark) Phoenix? Or the killer special effects? To be honest, I'm still not sure, so we'll see how this goes.
Let's begin with plot. Here is a quick summary: Warren Worthington II, whose son is a mutant, freaked out long, long ago and, since he's rich, spent his life and money trying to find a "cure" for the mutant gene. Luckily, he found Leech, a mutant whose ability is to hinder mutant powers and whose curse is his body produces an antibody to the mutant-X gene. So, there's a bunch of scared humans trying to cure this genetic difference, a bunch of people who suffer from that genetic difference who get pissed off, and a few other genetically-different chicos and chicas who don't really care either way, as long as nobody gets hurt. Mayhem ensues. There is also a girl (Anna Paquin) who really wants to have sex, a woman (Famke Janssen) who has recently become schizophrenic, and a man (Hugh Jackman) whose James Dean complex has become too much even for him to handle. Oh, there's also a bunch of third-rate ragtag mutants who are trying to make it in the world and start hanging out with the wrong crowd, a guy (James Marsden) whose taken the brooding-over-dead-loved-ones thing to a whole new level, and a man (Kelsey Grammar) who is torn between his politics and his genetics. And a man (Ian McKellan) who can't see love when it's smacking him in the face, another man (Patrick Stewart) who seriously needs to take off his rose-tinted goggles, and a woman (Rebecca Romijn) who is never as sad as when she stopped being blue. Oh, and of course, there's another guy (Ben Foster) who has some issues accepting who he is, genetically-speaking.
No, I am not exaggerating. All of this -- and more! -- happens in the movie. Individually, none of these plots seems too heinous or sparse or problematic, but when you shove all of them -- and more! -- into a movie that's under two hours, things begin to go a bit haywire. Certainly, the plot hinges around this so-called "mutant cure," but it veers off so often from that track that you begin to wonder if it were ever on it to begin with. I found myself craving more depth in some of the side plots -- notably the bit with Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Rogue (Anna Paquin), and Shadowcat (Ellen Page) -- and less "depth" (I use the term relatively) in some of the other ones. The movie ends with most of the side plots left open; indeed, by the end of the movie and after the near-Armageddon attempted by the Dark Phoenix, you are not even sure whether certain characters survived. Basically, what I am saying is that the movie felt like a teaser-trailer for about fifteen OTHER movies interspersed with one short allegory about the homosexual agenda.
That's the other thing, the one thing that amused me throughout most of the movie. In X2, I picked up on the obvious parallels between being a mutant and being a homosexual. (Yes, I'm gay, and yes, that's probably partly why I'm so quick to tie things to sexuality.) Here, in X3, with all this talk of "curing" the mutants and the mutants insisting that there is nothing to cure, yadda yadda yadda, the parallels are explicitly made. Yet... are they? Being gay threatens nobody; there are no gay men walking around ripping the Golden Gate Bridge from its hinges and using it as a weapon of mass destruction. There are no lesbians running around causing amok with the weather. The humans in the movie have a very valid right to be afraid of mutants, a very valid right to wish them controlled or contained or monitored. Here, in real life, heterosexuals have no reason to fear homosexuals; the most we are going to do is redecorate your living room and tell you how truly god-awful your fashion sense is. So, while I appreciate the parallel and the attempt to make people realize how freaking ridiculous "curing" homosexuality is, the parallels aren't exactly... well... parallel.
So, we have a bunch of normal humans trying to eradicate mutant-humans, and one of the mutant humans, Magneto (Ian McKellan), gets a bit pissed. He's the movie's bad guy, but throughout the whole damn thing, I found myself rallying with him more than with the X-Men. Sure, I don't know if I would opt for genocide of the genetically-normal population like he does, but I sure as Hell wouldn't want to sit around and let myself be "cured," which is what Professor X and his crew would have done, had Magneto not interrupted them with his Golden Gate Bridge maneuver. This, of course, points to another problem with the movie: character development. Or the lack thereof.
Now, action movies are never really about the characters. You do not go to an action movie and expect to be absorbed into the life of the star, to leave feeling as if you and Action Star are best friends who have known each other since you were knee-high to a newt, but you do, at least, want a bit of depth to the movie's cast. At least, I do, and (one of) the problem(s) with X3 is an excruciatingly palpable lack of this depth. Let's face it, folks: a puddle in the Sahara is deeper than these X-Men. I don't know if these movies are suffering from the same flaws of John Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Satan is the star, but the supervillains in X3 are much, much more enticing than the superheroes. As I already said, I identify most with Magneto and I found myself hoping against hope that he may win. His motivation, the impetus behind his actions, is clear; when he speaks and acts, he does so with passion, with force, with point. The superheroes seem to act simply to counter Magneto and his cronies. Even when the heroes do something unrelated to the mutant cure -- Cyclops's brief scenes of near-silent brooding, Wolverine's melodramatic (and ludicrous) attempts at remaining removed and then, even worse!, his attempts at showing affection -- they just seem... stock. The one true moment of passion, the one true instance of character development, is right after -- SPOILER ALERT -- Mystique is struck with the cure and reverts to normal-human status. She lies on the floor, writhing, as her skin turns peach and her hair turns brown, and Magneto abandons her, says "I'm sorry, my dear, you're one of them now," and a single tear rolls down the non-human Mystique's face. At this moment, you realize she truly loves Magneto, and not because of his magnetic (har har, a pun!) personality. Of course, you quickly realize that she is quite possibly the only person in the entire movie to feel anything, but...
Now, again, part of the problem with the characters is the same as part of the problem with the plot -- there's just too many! The highlight of my night was coming home after the movie, going on to IMDB, and reading the cast list and seeing how many of the mutants listed I could remember seeing in the movie. There are more characters than there are subplots, and it's nigh impossible to develop anyone's personality when they have a total of five minutes screen time. They had to kill off or demutate about three or four characters before the movie even got rolling because there were just too many new people to handle.
As if that weren't enough, some of the attempted character development just seems... weird. Rogue would never give up her powers willingly. Beast would never suggest that Professor X's school should close down. Storm would never be so... perky. Basically, all the characters were as flat as the glass on a mirror. Every now and then, it felt as if one of the characters were trying to turn themselves three-dimensional, trying to come out of the flat plane of the mirror's surface, only to find that they came out with the wrong reflection.
And finally -- and this is my last point, I promise -- what the HELL did they do to my poor Phoenix?! In the comics, the Phoenix began simply as Jean Grey's achieving maximum use of her mutant powers. Later, when the comics wanted Jean Grey (who had committed suicide in the original storyline) to return, they went back and changed things a bit -- they invented a cosmic entity known as the Phoenix Force that had created a duplicate of Jean Grey, possessed that duplicate, and stored the original Jean Grey, now comatose, at the bottom of the ocean. Now, in the original storyline, before the advent of this duplicate Jean Grey Phoenix Force crap, Jean Grey slowly goes insane due to her absolute power (absolute power corrupts absolutely, bleh bleh bleh), but in the movie, Jean needed to go freaky a lot faster than that, so they changed the whole story. In X3, the Phoenix is some subconscious part of Jean Grey, some alter-ego that controls (or is controlled by) Jean Grey's unlocked psychic potential, a schizoidal identity that had been locked by Professor X... until X2, when we began to see signs of its release. In the movie, the now-released Phoenix basically controls Jean Grey, and the Phoenix is not very happy about having been kept captive all these years. The result of all these changes is this: the Phoenix's (and, consequently, Jean Grey's) main role in the movie is to stand around, with badly-dyed Kool-Aid-red hair, and look confused and dimwitted, with the occasional temper tantrum which inevitably results in the flaying off of skin of some major mutant, like (SPOILER) Cyclops and Professor X. This is not the Phoenix of the comics, this is not the Phoenix of the 1990's animated series, this is not the Phoenix I know and love, this is not the Phoenix I expected after I saw X2, and this is my single biggest gripe with the movie. You cannot mess with my Phoenix and live to tell about it.
To be honest -- and I don't know how "true" this is -- what happened is it seems that X2's director and writers saw a direction for the sequel -- the Phoenix saga -- but X3's director and writers didn't like it, so they changed gears to what they wanted -- the mutant cure. The problem, of course, is that X2 laid far too many hints of the burgeoning Phoenix in Jean Grey and consequently incited far too many fans to expect her arrival in X3, so the third movie had to do something with the character. I am not all too familiar with the original comics -- there may in fact be a storyline in them regarding the mutant cure plot -- but it is not tied with the Phoenix saga, and it should not have been connected in this movie. It was a bad idea, with a bad result. Great special effects, but nevertheless, a bad result.
Oh, one other thing really annoyed me. (SPOILER ALERT!) The movie spent two hours, basically, killing off characters like Professor X and stripping others, like Magneto, Rogue, and Mystique, of their powers only to pull back at the end. Are Magneto's powers returning? Did Professor X transport his consciousness into the body of the comatose victim who made a really, really awkward and out-of-place-until-the-very-end cameo in the beginning of the movie? The world may never know. Basically, they ended the movie in the same way you are NEVER EVER supposed to end a short story -- by saying, "It was all a dream."
If anything, the one thing I learned from X3 is this: there are some stories (and some movies) that are better left in your imagination. In my head, X3 was going to be miraculous, and in my head, X3 and the Phoenix still are. X-Men: That Last Stand threatened that, but luckily, I am great at ignoring things in reality that I don't like.
Grade: C-
Grade Breakdown
Plot: D, C, D, D, C, C, B-, C
Characters: B- (redeemed via Mystique and Magneto)
Special Effects: A+
Adaptation: