Scratch

Here you will find older scratches, musings and other detritus that once were located on the front pages, but have now faded.

Filed away here to collect dust and cobwwwebs in perpetuity, links may break, facts may change and data may corrupt.

On occasion I may come down here to tidy, but for the most, I prefer to leave the past where it lies.

X-Men: The Last Stand

I have spent the last few hours trying to put into thoughts, let alone words, of how I felt when I saw X Men 3. (Although to be fair I saw X-Men 3 on the opening day and haven't either got round to a final decision or had time to write it up.) My initial overall reaction as I stepped out of the cinema was, as a film separate of fan base and history, that it was an all right action movie. There are moments of brilliance. But that's about it. That is up until the final 2 minutes (don't even get me started on the bit post credit) where is just falls apart, and you are left asking 'Why'? Throughout the film characters die, others are depowered, and then at the end it's as though they didn't have the courage of their convictions to stick to it. All that is achieved is removing certain characters and certain stories, but the extensive pool that exists. Its just shame it was these characters and this story.

It's not that I wanted the film to be bad. Dear God no. The film and the franchise means a lot to me. True the first movie wasn't perfect, the cast were skewed a bit young, Sabretooth was just wrong, but Magneto and Professor X were spot on. I could even overlook the changes with Wolverine. The second film redressed the balance and fixed the errors in the first film. There were still some discrepancies but they worked for the film. You could see why changes were made and appreciated that.

As franchises develop they seek to outdo the last, delivering bigger sets, bigger sequences, bigger casts, and usually at the expense of such superfluous items as plot, structure, timing etc. The original Batman, Superman and Blade films all fell foul of this, but X-Men (and Spiderman so far) bucked the trend. Bryan Singer (and Sam Raimi in Spiderman) juggle the main story with a complementary subplot, giving the main characters the right amount of time, and letting supporting characters develop enough to make them worthy of being in the movie. It's like they have been given access to the secret guide to adapting comics into films. Something that seems to have eluded Brett Ratner. But lets take this one bit of a time leaving the rabid fanboyness aside for the moment

The main problem with this film is that it fails to connect with the audience on any emotional level. Characters die, but in a manner where the only response is 'oh. That sucks'. And that's about it. It's like they've got confused between the main characters and the Red Shirts. Sure there are some touching moments such as Bobby finding a way to console Kitty, Magneto interacting with a family on the bridge o the Cyclops 'take of your glasses.' But that's about it. The love triangle, or more accurately the hint thereof has no screen time to establish depth let alone resolve, and this is helped by one of the participants disappears for the majority of the movie. The one moment I truly felt something, was for Rebecca Romijn's Mystique, and I can still picture that scene.

New characters are introduced well, and are knitted into the behind the scenes continuity. Kelsey Grammer's is Beast, but the prosthetics don't do enough to generate pain at his plight, the brains behind the beast. Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde does well with what she's given. Angel looks good and although has an element of a mcguffin about him, it does set things up for the future (although why in the promo materials he is in an 'X' suit I do not know, similarly why Cyclops is given you never see him outside his civies). Older characters such as Iceman/Pyro get to take more of a front stage, but suffer as Jackman's Wolverine gets front and centre, and rather than being an animalistic savage (I know, difficult to portray in a pg-13) he has levels of caring heaped upon him, until he becomes.. something more rom-com or paternal. Rogue is sidelined which is strange given the cure aspect and how I'dve thought she should be central to this. Patrick Stewart does what he does well, although the script doesn't do Xavier justice, and McKellen excels once again as Magneto. Jurys out on Vinnie Jones. Cyclops, don't get me started.

People criticise Brett Ratner for being a bad director, I'm not going to disagree, but I do not believe the fault lies entirely with him. Whilst the poor writing doesn't help, the fault of this movie lies solely with Tim Rothman and Fox attempt to rush this movie through as slap across the face to Singer who left to direct Superman after months of Fox's inactivity. After the opening w/e of X2 they execs at Fox should've sat down with Singer and discussed terms, not jerking him on the end of a chain for months on end, wait for him to leave to start work on what would be 2.5 years years on Superman, and they try and turn X3 round in a year, changing directors a week before shooting starts. Expletives abound.

The problem here, is that you replace Singer, who had a respect and knowledge of the original material and replace him with someone famous for Money Talks. In an attempt to compensate for Ratner missing Singer's versatility and experience of the subject matter (and idolisation thereof), not to mention the complete lack of time, its seems asthough they have just randomly plundered ideas and its here where it all breaks down, and this is where it gets a bit fanboy.

I talked earlier about the secret to making comic book movies, and this is something that the likes of Singer, Raimi, Nolan, del Toro, Donner, McTeigue and the Wachowski's seem to understand. You can take stories and change them, merge characters, get events wrong, but what matters is the soul of the characters. Keep things to the core of what they are and you won't go far wrong. If it makes more sense to vary something, fine. Its a film and you have anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 hours to tell a finite story, you don't have the thirty+ years. But the soul of it right.

Secondly, Whilst I may watch for nods to the comics via cameos, phrases etc, I don't want them thrown in for no reason. Danger Room, fine. Nod to Days of Future Past, good. Gratuitious use of Sentinels for Sentinels sake, pointless. A wasted opportunity, especially as it looked like a cars headlights floating in the sky. Jack Kirby designed a mutant hunting robot to strike fear into the innocent, to hearken to days when people would come in the night a whisk you away, preying on fears we can identify with. For the purposes of the danger room, they could've had anything, and it devalues the concept.

As I mentioned ealier, the first film made errors, Rogue and Wolverine were slightly off character, the former moreso. The second film corrected these and although she never dated Iceman, Rogue's ill faited romance angle was covered. Also the second added Nightcrawler and Collossus to the mix and pulled it of. Finally, Singer, at the end of perhaps one of the most critically acclaimed comic book adaptation, gives the hint of perhaps the adaptation of the quintessential X-Men Story. The Dark Phoenix Saga.

Without going into too much detail, this is an epic story that is played out across the stars, and that people would never have expected to remain true to all the original story with the Shi'ar and the Corsairs, so long as they kept the strong issues of love, jealousy, betrayal, intrigue and sacrifice. To be fair they didn't get the story wrong as they didn't do anything related to the original story except in a name. There was no Hellfire Club, no Black King, No White Queen, no corruption of Jean Grey, no possession, nothing of the original storyline at all (which given they are talking about an Emma Frost spin off movie would have been an awesome opportunity to introduce her.) Sure, shes addressed by the name 'Phoenix' but she isn't anything like the cosmic force that possesses the power to consume whole planets. A Quick Google's cache of 'Dark Phoenix' shows some of the original imagery used in, or derived from the comics, and it begs the question, why call it 'Phoenix'? Phoenix. A goddamn firey bird. You might as well have called that side of her psyche 'Buttercup' for all the relevance it had. Phoenix in X3 is Willow from Buffy, just a bit paler and a bit veinier. And this is what really grates. All the fire, carefully digitised round her at the end of X2, and the giant phoenix shaped object under the water, all leant to better things. The promise of Bryan Singer's adaptation, all gone. If Singer had done it he might not even have addressed the 'dark' aspect until another movie. Damn it, he might have treated it with care, and not rushed it. When Xavier talks about the range of emotions and difficulty that Jean suffers, we never get to see that. Nor do we get to see the confusion, her depth of love for Cyclops, the scope of her abilities and the nobleness of character.

I know that that being disappointed comes from 'knowing the comic' and I know the comic is not the same as the film, but I honestly felt that if that was all they were going to do with that character, then they should have saved the storyline for the 2nd X-Men trilogy. Keep the first one about Xavier and Magneto, and explore their relationship more through the medium of the cure plot without dragging 'dark' Phoenix into the mix. Fine, allude all you like, but it loses its resonance of someone going evil and being corrupted over time, if you never get to see the corruption, or if no time expires.

Its not that its awful. It just could have been so, so much better.

5 Jun 2006 12:52 | (2) comments | Movies