X-Men 3 is the MegaMaid of Movies…
…it goes from sucking to blowing.
Okay, time for me to geek out a little bit. You see, I saw X-Men 3 this weekend.
Hated it. I mean I hated it.
And because I hated it so much, I’m going to rant about it here. Buckle up.
Half the people I talk to (including a couple of notable comic book geeks) loved it. I don’t know if people are just blown away by the special effects or what, but I just don’t get where all the warm & fuzzy feelings for this flick come from. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I get why non-comic audiences can enjoy it. If I weren’t watching the X-Men up there and the first two movies didn’t exist, I probably could’ve just shut my brain off and enjoyed it. Sort of like Lost, which is a fun popcorn show whose depth is horribly overrated. But what director Brett Ratner and Fox have done didn’t just miss the mark with this movie, it’s an insult to the franchise.
Don’t get me wrong. I could care less about being 100% faithful to the source material. As much as I am a comic book whore, I’m not a full-on fanboy nutjob who obsesses over every altered detail. I don’t want to see Wolverine in “yellow spandex”. I don’t need a story arc from the comic thrown on screen word-for-word and scene-for-scene. I do, however, require a comic book movie to maintain the spirit of its source material. And in that regard, they completely blew it.
I just don’t understand how you can tell a story that is essentially the Dark Phoenix saga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Phoenix_Saga) and not have that be the principle plot, rather than a subplot element. As soon as they did that they went irrevocably off-course. It would be like making another Fantastic Four movie and making Galactus a subplot to Reed Richards finding a “cure” for Ben Grimm’s rocky complexion. In a Fantastic Four story Galactus is second fiddle to nobody. And neither is the Phoenix in an X-Men story. (And to reduce what the Phoenix is supposed to be to a schizo Jean Grey personality split, making her a Magneto sidekick, and then making the whole thing a subplot element to a magic mutant gene cure is insulting to anyone even a modicum of respect for the source material.)
In X-Men 2, director Bryan Singer beautifully set up a movie incarnation of the Phoenix storyline and Fox just threw it under the bus to tell yet another mutant genocide story. And it’s not like I’m calling for a faithful retelling of the comic Dark Phoenix Saga, which is so convoluted that even the creators don’t agree on what’s canon and what’s not. There didn’t need to be aliens and cosmic space battles. That would play horribly on screen. But what they did need was Jean Grey, Cyclops/Wolverine and one uberpowerful entity (cosmic or otherwise) searching for a host. I mean how hard is it for them to tell a story focused purely on the battle for Jean Grey’s soul, without having to throw in all that other garbage?
If Fox wanted to make this whole mutant cure movie, fine, but leave Jean Grey at the bottom of a lake and just tell that story. Why? Because you don’t get a second chance to tell the most compelling story arc in the history of the X-Men comic twice. I don’t have a problem with Fox making what in my mind is a bad movie, I have a problem with them taking this particular story element and wasting it on a bad movie. There are plenty of marginal X-Men story arcs Fox could’ve thrown on the screen if all they wanted to do was wreak havoc with the characters and make a few green backs off it.
And as much as I hated how they dealt with the fates of core characters in this movie, I could’ve at least respected the notion that they took chances and tried to so something shocking. But as anyone whose seen this movie knows (especially if you wait for the final scene that rolls after the credits), as soon as we got to the end of the movie they basically undo everything the audience just spent the last 90 minutes watching. So what exactly was the point of all this crap we just sat through?
This is what you get when you replace the guy who made The Usual Suspects with the guy who made Rush Hour and then throw him to the wolves with a hyper-accelerated production schedule. Ratner made a lot of bad decisions in this movie, in my opinion. Beyond my qualms with the overall story direction, this movie is chalk full of cliché scenes, campy dialog and overly frenetic pacing that is only glossed over because the effects are top notch and they have an impeccable cast that can make bad dialog sound good. But even with all that I can’t even blame Ratner that much for this movie. Fox saddled him with an impossible job and I’m actually amazed the movie came off looking as good as it did, despite the lack of real soul.
In a month Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns will hit theaters and there will be inevitable comparisons between the two movies. I can only hope that someone at Fox is paying attention when that happens. It was Singer’s intention to make X-Men 3, but he got the chance to breathe new life into Superman and chose to do that first. All Fox had to do was wait; or go and make their planned Wolverine movie or something. But no, they had to do X-Men 3 right away and make sure they beat Superman Lives to theaters. Well, they pulled that part off at least. I hope they’re happy, because I know anyone with a modicum of respect for the first two movies and the source material behind them is not.
June 1st, 2006 at 10:37 am
I guess part of the issue relates to what percentage of the people who go to see the films have any knowledge of the ‘canon’, or have just watched the first two films and quite liked them, and want to see how this ends. I must confess to being one of the latter, as, I suspect, are the majority of the moviegoers given the size of the box office.
To that end, I’ll probably end up seeing X3 at some point, but if I think that the Superman one is anything other than stellar, then I won’t be bothering with that, as the core concept is quite dull.
June 1st, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I saw X3 last weekend and really liked it. I’m not a comic book guy at all. In fact, I’ve never once read a superhero comic. At first, I didn’t like the fact that Jean was back, but I thought they at least came up with an inventive way of bringing her back. As I’m sure with most people that see this movie, I had no knowledge of The Phoenix. The bottom line for me was that I enjoyed the show.
I didn’t however stay for the credits, what happens after the credits?
June 1st, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Dave, the thing is, there’s nothing “canon” about either of the first two X-Men movies, which I think are good and perfect, respectively. Both of them are true to the *spirit* of the source material and the studio/director, in my opinion, do have a responsibility to do that and that’s where this movie derails for me personally.
But understand if this were just a movie, in my eye, it would still be fundamentally flawed in ways that I think moviegoers are ignoring. It’s a trite, poorly paced and clumsy picture that glosses over its shortcomings because of its fantastic effects and a very, very talented cast whose characters we’re already familiar with (thanks to the first two movies).
***spoiler***
Craig - It flashes to a hospital room where we see a coma patient that Charles Xavier was talking about earlier on in the film. The patient’s dr. leans over him and we hear Xavier’s voice come out of the body, “Hello, Moira.” (or something to that affect)
***end spoiler
Anyway, at the end of the day it’s a case of to each their own. I could’ve enjoyed it had it not had X-Men branding on it, or if it hadn’t been the Phoenix story arc that they chose to squander, but on no level do I think it’s a particularly good film in terms of how it tells its story (regardless of canon).
June 1st, 2006 at 3:23 pm
thanks to friends who went before me, my expectations were low, so i enjoyed the my experience. mostly because me and my friend were making jokes about everything. with the first two i went several times to the theater & still bought the DVD’s. i dont need to see x-3 again. i dont think it added anything to the future of xmen movies. while mystique is apparently cured, we see magneto seemingly getting his powers restored. if they continue the series, everyone will get thier powers back and this will eventually be the forgotten picture. i dont care about the professor returning because it was not built up well.
there are many reasons never to see this again.
A - they took too many liberties with the audience understanding everything as if everyone had seen the first two. the first two could stand alone and be easily understood.
B - they killed villian characters off without even explaining thier powers to any real extent. i have not read the comics for over 20 years. how am i supposed to know or remember every minor character?
C - the lines were so canned it was insulting. “charles always wanted to build bridges” the overall worst line.
D - the pyro / iceman fight had all the intensity and drama of WWF.
E - no good brand new characters were developed to the extent you cared. if you do not know beast, do you have any idea what he can and cannot do from what you saw in the film?
F - most of all, Mystiqe loses her powers and it takes all of one second to make the decision to leave her behind. you just spent severe amounts of resources to free her. if nothing else, you do not leave behind your right hand changling, who could very well have more knowledge of every detail of your orginiztion than you do. you kill her or take her back and see if you can fix her. even if you hate humans, you are not that big an idiot in crucial situations.
i was very looking forward to this sequel. in retrospect, i am very disappointed. i would have rather waited a year than recieve this tripe.