If any of the couple readers of this blog doubt my commitment to summer movies, let me just say this- I will be unemployed at the beginning of June. Right when the big dirge of over bloated action movies and crappy, star-driven comedies really starts to come out. And my apartment gets really hot on summer afternoons. So these summer movie updates will begin to increase very quickly indeed.
So here I am, back in the summer movie game. Tonight, I ventured out to Hollywood to see “X-Men: The Last Stand” at Grauman’s Chinese, probably the most famous movie theatre in the world. I saw “X2” there a couple years ago and had a great experience, and hoped I could replicate that tonight, despite some very bad early buzz on the movie. Before I go into brutal detail about “The Last Stand,” I want to say I did have one wonderful experience at The Chinese tonight. I got to see the trailer for a little movie that might be the hit of the summer. No, not “Pirates 2” or “Superman Returns.” I’m not talking about “Cars” or “Click.”
It started with a black screen with text slowly fading in and out, telling us that there are a lot of movies coming out this summer with super heroes, animated adventures, swashbuckling pirates, and big comedy stars.
“But only one of them has…
SNAKES ON A PLANE.”
It was a delirious moment. The crowd erupted in cheers, and I yelled out in delight.
Too bad it was the highlight of the evening.
“X-Men: The Last Stand” is a huge disappointment. Bryan Singer’s first “X-Men” film was very good and very clever, despite severe budget limitations. When he got to make
“X2” with a much bigger budget, it showed. “X2” kicked ass, and ended on a perfect note for long time fans of the characters, with Jean Grey sacrificing herself to save her friends- with a final shot implying that she might not really be dead.
That she would rise again as Phoenix.
Now, I am going to get a little geeky on y’all, but you’ve probably come to expect that. “The Dark Phoenix Saga” is one of the best storylines in the history of comics. To make a long story short, in the comic version, Jean dies and is reborn as the most powerful being in the universe. She starts off working for good, working with her friends who thought they had lost her for good. But the power proves too much for her, and she loses control, giving over to The Dark Phoenix.
How bad does it get once Jean goes to the Dark Side? She destroys a planet. An entire planet. She wipes out an entire race, an entire history, a whole civilization. And she does it with her mind.
The X-Men have to make the worst decision of their lives- they have to destroy their friend. But when they go after her, they get their asses handed to them. Only Cyclops, the love of her life, is able to bring her back from the brink of slaughtering her friends. And when she does come around, she realizes she has only one choice.
She destroys herself.
My two paragraph description of the saga doesn’t do it any sort of justice. The story is really powerful, exciting stuff. There is a lot of anguish throughout this thing. The people who once loved this person are forced to destroy her. It’s great comic book literature, and could have made a hell of a movie.
It could have.
But the Dark Phoenix stuff is totally and utterly blown by the filmmakers of “X-Men: The Last Stand.” Bryan Singer jumped ship to make “Superman Returns” (which looks pretty magnificent from the trailers so far.) Despite losing the driving creative force that made the first two “X-Men” movies so good and so successful, Fox decided to press ahead.
By hiring one of the biggest hacks in Hollywood to fill Singer’s shoes. Brett Raetner is probably not a bad guy in real life. I can’t say what type of human being the guy is, but damn can he take the life out of a franchise. His “Red Dragon” turned Hannibal Lecter into a silly and tame joke, defanging one of the most frightening monsters in the history of cinema. And now he and his writers have done the same for almost every character in the X-Men franchise. He’s turned Wolverine, the crazy, berzerker badass into a silly one-liner machine. What happened to Logan’s continuing struggle with his past that was a big part of the first two movies? The whole subplot is just dropped.
Worse yet is his treatment of Charles Xavier, or Profesor X. The spiritual leader of the X-Men, the man whose wisdom and guidance even Magneto respected, is turned into nothing more than a huge asshole in this movie. In a goofily expository scene, he tells Wolverine that when he first met Jean, he realized her powers were so great that he created mental blocks in her mind to suppress her powers. That move was dick enough, but when Wolverine calls him on it, the supposedly sage and compassionate leader just says “I don’t have to justify myself Logan, least of all to you.” Well why the hell not, you pompous ass? I know this sounds ridiculous and nitpicky and geeky, but I don’t care. Profesor X would never say that. It was a lazy and ridiculous out for the writers to take, and it shits on years and years of character development throughout the comic books.
I am going to go into a couple SPOILERS in this paragraph, just to finish my point on the shitty job they did with handling Xavier in this movie. When Jean wakes up and almost kills Wolveine, Profesor X just looks at him and asks “what have you done?” Well, he didn’t do anything, you bald creep. Her mental dams burst, now you’re blaming Wolverine? But worse yet, when Xavier confronts her- she kills him! Profesor X is just killed brutally, with no dramatic build to it. This is not an inevitable tragic moment- it just happens, and then the movie just kind of moves on after a short funeral scene. Not to mention that Jean Grey kills Cyclops in the first ten minutes of the movie- the love of her life. I’m no fan of James Marsden’s portrayal of Cyclops, but his relationship to Jean is one of the most powerful parts of the Phoenix story- and the movie kills him off in the first act. I guess somebody felt that Wolverine was more compelling, so they should make him be the one to go after Jean and confront her at the end. To tell the truth, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is more compelling than Marsden any day, but there would have been real drama if the Cyclops/ Jean Grey/ Wolverine love triangle had remained intact until the end. Major characters are just tossed aside for no reason other than shock value.
END SPOILERS.
The other plot of the movie- and there really are just two plots thrown together with no sense of grace- is the “Mutant Cure” created from the DNA of a young mutant whose power is to sap other mutants of their own power. The cure storyline is interesting and could have been compelling, but isn’t given enough screentime to develop. There are just too many characters, too many subplots, too much exposition, too many inspiring speeches to pack into such a short movie. There is no grace to the storytelling- each successive scene just feels like it randomly appeared, not as if it was a logical extension from the scene previous. The movie was rushed, and it feels that way.
The whole mess ends up on Alcatraz Island, for some bizarre reason. Despite the fact that Alcatraz is a hugely popular tourist attraction, in the reality of the movie The Worthington Corporation, who creates the Mutant Cure, has labs on the island. I don’t know why they chose to put it on Alcatraz, since the characters never enter the famed prison- they run through a generic lab set that is supposedly built at the base of the prison. The only reason the filmmakers chose Alcatraz seems to be so they could show off their niftiest special effects shot, in which Magneto uses his power to lift the Golden Gate Bridge and fly it over to Alcatraz. Why Jean Grey isn’t the one who does the heavy lifting is puzzling- the filmmakers claim her power is limitless while Magneto’s isn’t- even for him, lifting a bridge seems a little extreme. And then again, why didn’t they just take a boat?
The final battle commences, and the X-Men are short a bunch of members, so we get a few new under-developed characters fighting on their side against Magneto’s army. During the whole final showdown, Jean Grey just kind of stands there, waits for the fight to end, then goes crazy herself. It’s like she knows she is part of a totally separate storyline and is just waiting for the Cure story to end so she can resume her storyline. And what does “the most powerful mutant to ever live” do? She…shoots some water in the air. So her power amounts to what happens at the Bellagio in Vegas once an hour. Storm could do that any day without breaking a sweat- but the less screen time Halle Berry gets in these movies, the better.
The movie left me annoyed and angry. It’s not any worse than most summer movies, and is probably technically better than “M:I:3.” But these are characters I have loved since I was a little kid, and the story being told is one that had a huge impact on me years ago. Seeing this epic storyline told so poorly, and seeing these characters represented so badly is much more offensive to me than most bad summer movies could ever hope to be.
3 comments:
It's hard.. i know.. the third in a series always has SOOO much potential... I mean look at it's anscestral thirds which it follows... Terminator 3... Looks Who's Talking 3... all such classics...
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