The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Mutant Mayhem

Well, late May's arrived and with it X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Nick and I (Trav, having been up most of the night, decided to skip it) went to see it at the 10 am showing today.

(I'll keep anything that might be a spoiler beyond the "More?" marker, so what you can see here on the main page should be considered safe. As the day's soon to sweep me back out the door to other duties, some travelling and a visit, I might revisit this for an edit sometime tonight, maybe to add some other links and images to dress it up.)

In this, the installment all of the cast's been instructed to present to the world as very likely the last time this cast will be together, multiple elements are moved forward and resolved. Well... as resolved as anything in comics or a successful movie franchise can be said to be resolved.

Much action & spectacle. Two love triangles, though one of them more perceived than real. Several new characters, including a fairly good Beast as presented by Kelsey Grammar, help the movie along.

As close as I'll get to a spoiler up here is to say that as the film rolled through into the second half and sped towards the conclusion (and at 1 hr 43 minutes it's there fairly quickly) if I had to choose I word it would be disappointing.

Click below for a spoiler-filled critique if you've either seen the movie or have little intention of seeing it and for some reason still want someone's opinion.

Okay. If you're reading past this point then I'm going to presume you've seen the film or are familiar with the characters but not interested in seeing it -- I'm not going to spend time on a dramatis personae, even if I might seem to slip in that direction a few times.

Given the back-and-forth following my review for V For Vendetta, where I liked it but found myself up against a seeming wall of "it was... okay, but nothing more" the turnaround here is likely to be amusing., as I see generally postitive reviews popping up over on Mark's blog and then again on Tony's, where aside from a couple provisos it's given a ditto.

Hitting back on the plus side, I thought it was gutsy to kill off Scott -- though as we never saw a body we're not 100% sure what Jean did to him, we're just presuming she took him apart. Some more focus on Bobby Drake, Rogue/Marie and Kitty were all nice to see . As mentioned elsewhere I enjoyed Grammar's take on Hank McCoy. While the movie version of Piotr/Colossus remains something of a cypher, it was good to see him worked in more and to get a Fastball Special or two. There are other things -- they'll likely come to me while I'm getting on with the rest of my day, and may find their way into this piece before Sunday. Whether I do or not, this is probably one of those movies I'll enjoy more, months down the line, re-watching it on DVD. With the release time it has, surely there will be at least 15 minutes of deleted scenes that might help.

But, where was I? Disappointment. Yes.

Character specifics aside (I'll get to those shortly) there's a sense of plot elements squandered. No, it isn't that they've overlapped a new development in the conflict between humans and mutants with a vastly simplified and accelerated version of the Dark Phoenix story, but that they had some cliche elements in mind and rushed towards them despite where any second, rational and/or creative thoughts might have taken them instead.

My complaints have nothing to do with whether or not the movie faithfully told one or more of the stories originally presented in the comics. Anyone who saw the first two movies and somehow went into this one expecting to see comics stories brought to life either didn't watch the earlier movies or has a very selective grasp of the stories. No, I don't insist on that, I only look for a movie (and, in this case, a franchise) that remains internally consistent and entertaining.

I can't say that I really got the consistency nor was solidly entertained. Oh, there's plenty of battle scenes to groove to and the story moves at a brisk clip, but...

That the writer(s) decided to not only move Magneto more firmly into the camp of racist, but also make him a faithless leader who abandons a trusted aide the moment she is turned human (Mystique) and treats the lower-tier mutants who flkock to him like fodder makes a sham of any pretense of nobility. Eric Lensher/Magneto's stock plummets in this film. Oh, sure, we saw him be imperious in the earlier films and be willing to sacrifice Rogue's life in the first movie, but this moves it to a new level of callousness that reveals someone who couldn't possibly remain leader by anything but force of his mutant power.

I suspect that how a viewer evaluates Logan/Wolverine in this movie will largely be a function of age and exposure. As with Magneto we're presented with a character we're supposed to see some nobility in (and, to be fair, it's more easily seen here than in Magneto since Logan at least has the back of his friends) but whose methods belie what some of us would see as heroic. Once the action starts he pops his claws and he begins slashing, stabbing, effectively disembowling and even dismembering -- all in a ratings-driven, mystically bloodless fashion.

This is the Wolverine a few too many fans have come to embrace since the character first started to wander down this path, well... a couple years into the Claremont/Byrne run, and which proceeded from there to new depths at the hands of Frank Miller and others. To the overwhelming mass of comics fans, that's who Logan is. I, recalling how in the early (post-Hulk/early New X-Men) presentations he was supposed to be a perpetually misunderstood being whose strength of character, a hard-won humanity, trumped his feral nature. Someone who treated his claws as a tool, and regarded killing as the lowest of actions.

Fans of what he became see it as a case of "he has knives pop out of his fits, so of course he uses them" and take the rest as case closed, rather than asking why a police officer - equipped with a gun - doesn't shoot everyone he comes up against. Or, closer to the subject matter, why Cyclops doesn't blow his enemies apart.

I know that in the early days they were reaching for something higher with the character, and I hold out some (very) dim hope that someone in comics will, upon growing weary of a one-note presentation, find and rekindle that spark -- perhaps working in that direction by putting him into some association with someone like Captain America... That, however, is for another time and a look at comics.

In this movie Logan pops his claws and then seems to be going for a body count; a nod to the video game generation, I suppose. In the climactic battle scene we see him not only continue to sut into people but pause only because he's amazed that one of the mutants he's fighting has limbs that keep growing back. Oh, yeah... join us, we're the good guys!

The conclusion of the climactic battle is one of those elements where someone had a scene in mind and refused to budge from it. Logan, it was determined, had to skewer Jean -- killing her in order to "save" her -- but mostly so he could hold her immediately afterwards, look up into the grim skies and yell in anguish.

Hey. Einstein. Your whole plan required you expecting Jean to let you get close enough to take her out. If you're that close, and you have little plastic injectors of something that will turn off a mutant's powers - you know, like the four that Hank McCoy stuck into Magneto? Maybe that might be a better approach? Oh, sure -- we in the jaded audience would know that leaving her alive would only mean someone would eventually undo it, but here's two things:

They already brought her back from "certain" death, so what's to lose?

The characters aren't supposed to behave as if they know they're in a movie.

So, turning off Jean's powers - something that might be permanent, but it's a reasonably safe bet that it won't be any more permanent than running three steak knives into her vital organs - is less palatable than killing her? The idea that it would be too much like a lobotomy, and so is something to be avoided the way the X-Men refused that option in X-Men #137 (the conclusion of the Dark Phoenix storyline) has some weight, but even in that story it just meant the X-Men decided to fight for her. The Phoenix offer herself in the original story; it was self-sacrifice.

Eh. The only refuge one can take in this is that Jean had asked Logan to kill her, but, really, is that a request a friend should really take to heart in a moment of crisis?

Well, it either works for you or it doesn't.

The bridge stunt - where Magneto rips the Golden Gate and runs it out to Alcatraz... I won't even ask what the point was, as I can accept that it was a show of power more than anything like an effective way of reaching the island. (By the way, how did he and his shabby posse travel out to the coastline? A minor matter, but one of those details that the size of his small army can't help but suggest.) I just want to know what was holding the bridge together and up out of the water after it was ripped off its foundatins and moved? Sorry, it simply doesn't work. If I'm nit-picking, so be it. It was one of many instances that yanked me out of the movie, so it gets noted.

The nature of the post-credits bonus scene was telegraphed, though I won't fault them for that. That Xavier would, in a moment of supreme crisis, transfer his mind into a healthy-but-mindless body being maintained on Muir Island makes sense. That it was set up for us on a silver platter by having that subject be the object of the ethical mutant behaviour lesson the Prof. was teaching just before things start popping is just one of those areas where the audience was being spoon-fed.

This wailing wall of text isn't meant to be a relentless rain of despair on the movie, as I did have some fun watching it. I'd just be lying if I said that the chessboard tremor of Magneto's power at the official close of the movie - confirming that the "cure" was almost certainly a transient one - had me anticipating an X-4.

Oh, one last note, this one on the cure... I'm still uncertain how the whizzes at Worthington's research institute managed to sythesize a chemical mutant supressant agent when Leech's power - the mutant who was the "source" - was so plainly a field effect. It's difficult to see this as anything but a mixture of scriptwriters' ignorance and the dramatic drive to have darts rather than a field-generating weapon or even a focused "ray gun" delivery. If I have to make it work, I'll presume his power causes the spontaneous formation of some agent in any mutant's body, and it's that that they synthesized in a more persistant form.