"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Revisiting the X-Men trilogy

summer2016originstn_x-menX-MEN (2000)

Remember when comic book movies were rare, and usually bad? When the idea of a Marvel Comics movie not powered by Wesley Snipes being a mainstream hit seemed laughable? It’s hard to believe that Bryan Singer, then the respected director of Oscar-winning THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and not a self-identified “geek”, was there to take the torch from BLADE, and that he is still doing X-Men movies 16 years later. Now he’s in a vastly different pop culture, where there are nine total movies in this world (plus more, including a TV show, in the works)… and it’s not even one of the more popular Marvel Comics movie franchises currently running!

We’re used to the X-Men now. We have experienced alternate timelines, recastings and two different spin-off series. And I don’t know if I’d ever rewatched the first one since part 2 came out. I wasn’t sure how well it would hold up, but I gotta tell you, I liking going back to a world where they had to work to convince us that this shit was cool. They took nothing for granted.

mp_x-menI enjoy the epic serialization of the Marvel movies as much as the next guy, but it’s refreshing to see a beginning here, when they had to explain this concept of mutants, how governments react to the discovery of their existence, and how they respond to that, dividing into two organized factions with differing ideologies. You could say mutants in this movie are a little like transgender people right now in that they’re starting to have a higher visibility in the world and that’s causing other people, and lawmakers, to freak out. The government wants to register them. Magneto, who already has a number tattooed on his wrist from an older type of registration, is not gonna lay down.

Mutants don’t have origin stories, they’re just born that way. So all these characters are already who they are, and most of them get dramatic introductions with their backs turned to the camera before they reveal themselves. The first time we see Professor X it’s just the back of his head as he sits in the audience at a congressional hearing about mutant registration. The shot that rotates around and first shows us his face starts as Senator Kelly talks about rumors of… him, basically.

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Then we see Magneto for the first time as an adult. He’s putting on his fedora and leaving in the middle of the event, obscuring his face, like a spy or assassin in a suspense thriller. We last saw him as a child watching his parents be dragged into a concentration camp, so whatever he’s planning we’re not gonna be too judgmental.

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But he’s a mystery. He’s walking with his back to us.

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Then we see his face in silhouette, like a mysterious stranger in an alley in a film noir…

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…before he finally shows himself.

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We meet Wolverine from the back too, inside a fighting cage having a drink, unconcerned about the no-holds-barred fights he’s currently partaking in.

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It goes on for a minute or two, from different angles, but only seeing his back, then his face obscured by the cage and the fighter beating him down, until he stands up.

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When we see his face we know this other guy is about to get walloped. After the fight Wolverine turns his back again and smokes a cigar.

Storm and Cyclops have their introduction together, appearing out of nowhere to rescue Wolverine and Rogue from a Sabertooth attack. We first see wind – like a harbinger of doom in a horror movie, but here it marks the arrival of a famous super power – and glance their blurry forms over the villain’s shoulder.

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Then we see them silhouetted in Storm’s snow.

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Then, very suddenly, we see their faces. They look like creepy aliens. I love it.

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After the massive success, both artistic and financial, of Marvel’s “shared universe” concept leading up to and continuing after THE AVENGERS, it seems like the whole world forgot about the entire history of storytelling up until that date. When BATMAN V. SUPERMAN fumbled its story about three iconic super heroes, some blamed it on them not having had separate movies leading up to their meeting. That, of course, is ridiculous. X-MEN, like almost all movies, shows that you can have an ensemble of interesting characters who you’re meeting for the first time. It can be exciting to learn about them, or even to wonder about them when you don’t know much about them. This is a movie all about larger than life characters, but the interesting stuff is their relationships and their disagreements.

The action climax, a battle on top of the Statue of Liberty, doesn’t hold up as well as the rest of the movie. It’s sort of charmingly dated in its special effects, but they hadn’t yet figured out how to do the big super hero spectacle without being a little cornier than the rest of the movie. I do like that the action here is more stunt oriented than super hero movies have been since BLADE II pioneered the digital stunt double. Coming about 16 months after THE MATRIX means there’s some wire work. And Ray Park plays Toad, because it was in that little window where it was cool to put Darth Maul in this or SLEEPY HOLLOW.

The first X-MEN happened so long ago that this is what the DVD menu looks like.
The first X-MEN happened so long ago that this is what the DVD menu looks like.

The best part is the character drama. I guess if I had to choose I usually prefer a fast-paced movie, but it really is refreshing now to watch a super hero movie where they take their time like this. Wolverine grudgingly becoming friends with Rogue is kind of the center of the movie, and there’s a long scene of them in his truck just talking. Long in a good way. When they bring up their powers it seems like they haven’t really talked to anyone about this stuff before. I totally forgot about the part where she looks at his hands and asks, “When they come out… does it hurt?”

“Every time,” he says sadly.

That great moment really made me feel for Logan Wolverine, even as he fulfills his role as our grizzled cynical wiseass loner, our Clint Eastwood character (and I still think he looks alot like him here). He also gets to be our audience stand-in as Professor X and Jean Grey give him a tour through their world: the school, the underground lair, Cerebro, the jet, the uniforms. They wear black leather and Cyclops makes a nonsensical jab at comics-Wolverine wearing “yellow spandex,” convinced that audiences would never accept too much comic book shit. Things were so different then that an easter egg on the DVD is an outtake where, as a prank, a guy dressed as Spider-man ran into the scene.

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I remember at the time it seemed hilarious, it seemed to look ridiculous. Now it doesn’t at all. Now that’s the main type of movie that’s made.

Give Singer credit – he was the Professor X who opened a dialogue between the nerd world and their natural enemy, everybody else. He was the bridge.

X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)

mp_x-men2I also rewatched X2, and that one holds up extremely well too. I’m not gonna go into too much detail about it here, because in my opinion my original review from when it came out in theaters is one of the great works of early 21st century film criticism. You can find it here on outlawvern.com or in my important book Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer. But I have a few comments to add.

X-MEN ended brilliantly with Magneto confined in an all plastic prison and Xavier coming to visit and play chess with him. Still in contention with each other, but still friends, despite everything. X2 now has a really cool way of getting him out of that prison. Mystique seduces one of the guards, drugs him and injects him with iron. When he shows up to work again Magneto can sense the iron, pulls it every-so-painfully out of him, and turns it into a small ball which he shoots around like a bullet, shattering the walls around him. He’s still suspended in the middle of a huge pit, so he then turns the ball into a flat disc which he stands on and floats out. You can say “he controls metal” and figure he can throw cars around and stuff, but it takes some imagination to come up with this kind of resourcefulness with a small piece of smuggled in metal. Just like any prisoner making a weapon out of a toothbrush or what have you.

It’s one of the cleverest super power displays I can think of, and it’s only one of several great set pieces in X2. Another is the opening, with Nightcrawler warping through layers of White House security to get to the president, dodging bullets and leaving clouds of inky blue smoke. My favorite is the scene in the X-Man Jet. The military tries to ground them, which when you think about it is very reasonable because there are repercussions to having a private army with equipment like that. You need permits and shit. When the X-Men refuse to land, though, they get shot at. (People always compare Xavier to MLK, but this part is more like Black Panthers getting pulled over.)

This is a great example of Singer’s knack for creating action scenes with various mutants working together using their specific skills. Wolverine comments in disbelief that they have a jet like this with no weapons on it… cut to Storm. (It’s so beautiful that they say “We are the weapons” with editing, and not with dialogue.) She uses weather against their attackers, but two missiles are shot at them. Jean Grey uses her telepathic powers to dismantle one of them, but she’s not able to stop the other from exploding near them, tearing off the back of the jet and sucking Rogue out. Gulp.

Everybody knows who has to take this one – the new guy, Kurt Nightcrawler, who is terrified. But they tell him he has to and he knows it so he warps out of the jet, grabs her, warps back. It’s exhilarating!

The story of X2 has Magneto and his people calling a truce with the X-Men to try to stop a part of the government’s oppressive anti-mutant actions. I love that shit! We already know about their long-time tentative friendship (or frenemyship as it is now known) from the first one and now we get to see it paid off. And I’ve always loved that in these movies I often agree with Magneto and Mystique’s stances. It’s a much more interesting dynamic than in most super hero stories where there isn’t much ambiguity about who’s the good guy and the who’s the bad guy.


X-MEN: THE LAST STAND (2006)

mp_x-men3In a non-scientific sampling of people I’ve talked to about these movies recently, I found that many haven’t rewatched the first one in years, or felt it wasn’t very good, while X2 is still generally well regarded. And everyone watched X3 one time when it came out and are sure it’s terrible. If they’re right, I’ve been wrong for a decade straight now. I really liked it then and still do now.

I don’t expect any kind of re-evaluation of X3 to happen, but watching it again I really get the feeling it was ahead of its time. I’m not saying this is the only reason they didn’t like it, but the internet people were definitely up in arms because their boy Matthew Vaughn left and was replaced by Brett Ratner, who (like Zack Snyder) they saw as the kind of guy they hated in high school. And I don’t think they understood that he was pretty much following the blueprints Vaughn left behind, so they saw it as an assault when he did extreme and dramatic things (killed off some characters) even though he was the one who insisted on adding the comic’s popular Danger Room, Sentinel and “fastball special” and the post-credits loophole for resurrecting Xavier.

But in my opinion X3 – which predates IRON MAN and the Marvel Cinematic Universe by 2 years – now plays alot like the Marvel movies. It builds off of the universe and characters set up in the previous movies, does some soap opera shit and puts them through major drama, sometimes offset with little comic relief moments (like when a mother on a destroyed bridge sees Magneto and locks her car doors). Much more than the previous X-pictures it is unabashedly comic booky, with all kinds of blue people and mutants in weird capes and helmets standing around together like it’s totally normal…

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… and big battles with people warping and multiplying themselves and shooting weird projectiles and hovering and stuff. Six years after the “yellow spandex” comment, Ratner straight up has a government agency called “The Department of Mutant Affairs” and its Secretary is blue-fur-covered Hank “Beast” McCoy, in a suit and tie, taking briefings in his office and sitting in on meetings in the war room.

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grammerAnd he’s played by Kelsey Grammer! That was a Vaughn contribution, if I remember right, but still – some magical outside of the box casting that really worked.

The elaborate – though very digital looking – spectacle with Jean Grey’s overwhelming destructive powers and Magneto’s moving of the Golden Gate Bridge resemble what is now the Marvel house style. It was the movie that introduced digital de-aging, later used in ANT MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA 3. It was the first of the series – I believe the first comic book movie period? – to have a post-credits sequence, and yes, it was one designed to set things up for future installments.

Of course, it is a more analog movie than we have today in that it has tons of fights with actors and stunt people swinging around on wires (this is particularly cool in the case of Beast). Back then you took that for granted, but you don’t see it as much anymore.

The Golden Gate Bridge sequence is interesting because in recent years massive urban destruction in movies has been deemed offensive. X3 happened after a ten year Roland-Emmerich-inspired run of blockbuster movies where that sort of thing was a major component expected by the audience. Still, Ratner uses it in a different way, because Magneto tears off a piece of the bridge not necessarily to wreck shit, but to use it as transportation and then to serve as a direct path on and off of Alcatraz. I don’t care for the one-liner he follows it up with, but this is the type of spectacle that makes super powers seem truly awe-inspiring.

Like part 2, this has a great prison escape sequence. Mystique is held captive in a mobile prison in the back of a truck. Bad idea. Magneto stops the truck and lets out all the other prisoners, giving himself a new team of mutants.

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Though Mystique doesn’t last the whole movie, her personality really comes through. She’s scary and badass and mischievously funny when she fucks with her interrogators. Then there’s the horrible tragedy of the guard shooting a mutant-cure-dart at Magneto. Mystique dives in front of it, sacrificing her own powers to save him, and he repays her by leaving her behind. Even asshole Pyro gives a look like “whoah, that’s fucked up.”

In her very brief last appearance in the movie she maintains the Mystique mystique, because she’s said to have turned state’s evidence on Magneto, but subsequent events indicate that she may still be fighting for the cause, even as a dumb homo-sapien.

At the time, fans were very upset about what they saw as callous deaths of characters. I wonder if now that every one one of the dead have re-appeared maybe they can take it less personally. Yes, Cyclops dies off screen, but in a very dramatic manner at the hands of his own love. Xavier senses it and it causes a high-pitched sound in everyone’s brains so that Wolverine and Storm instantly run to him to find out what’s going on.

I love how much the movie centers on the triangle of Xavier, Magneto and Jean. It opens with Xavier and Magneto working together, coming like basketball scouts to recruit young Jean from her suburban home. Xavier sees her powers as something dangerous that must be harnessed, while Magneto delights in them, just wants them to be unleashed. In the middle of the movie they all return to that house and it becomes the unlikely setting for the momentous super power battle in which Magneto gets his way. Be careful what you wish for.

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Magneto is so much more interesting than any of the villains in the official Marvel movies. In the comics he’s a big muscleman, and Singer brilliantly decided to say fuck that, I’m gonna hire an old Shakespearean actor and no, I’m not gonna make him use human growth hormones. McKellen obviously has the gravitas to be believable as a militant leader that everyone wants to follow, yet he has many vulnerable moments, especially in this one. When he gets knocked on his ass and watches Jean kill Xavier he yells out to her, trying to stop her. And suddenly the great leader seems pathetic, crumpled on the floor, kinda looking like a kid wearing a grown up’s clothes.

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He’s legitimately scared about what he’s unleashed, that has killed his old friend. Look at him. This moment he dreamed about for so many years and now it’s here and he probly feels like he’s gonna shit himself.

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Later he defends Xavier’s honor from shitty comments by punk-ass Pyro. He has regrets. Then again, he believes he’s doing the right thing. Charles has become a martyr in his cause.

But when he sees Jean unleashing a psychic onslaught during the climax he definitely knows he fucked up by pushing her over the edge like this. In fact he straight up asks “What have I done?” even though his facial expression would do the trick.

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Then, when he’s tricked/betrayed and loses his powers, look how helpless he looks:

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Sad old man on the ground. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. You feel for him.

I’ve enjoyed the second X-MEN trilogy, with the middle chapter, DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, being the best one by far (and APOCALYPSE being the worst of either trilogy). But rewatching the original three made me realize that I genuinely love this series. It’s a great set of characters in a well thought out world with interesting issues and just the right serious tone. It has a unique setup where the hero and villain are mostly just guys who disagree with each other, who still have a friendship going back to the old days and sometimes even put their differences aside to work together. But sometimes not. And all of these things lead naturally into dramatic encounters and exciting super-power-based set pieces. It even has a good theme song.

This is one long-running series I don’t mind going on forever.

 

HISTORY: X-Men was a comic book starting in 1963. In the decades since it has built into an empire of spinoff books that still continue. They have appeared in over a dozen animated series’ since the ’80s and there are two live action shows coming soon. This summer’s X-MEN: APOCALYPSE is part six of the movies, or part three of the second trilogy. There have also been two (soon three) Wolverine spin-offs, one (eventually two) DEADPOOL spin-off and they’re supposedly doing another spin-off called GAMBIT. So there’s alot of X-Men shit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2016 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

21 Responses to “Revisiting the X-Men trilogy”

  1. I too re-watched the original trilogy before Apocalypse but I almost didn’t. It seems since Iron Man and the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe the general opinion is that these movies are embarrassingly bad and we need to destroy them so we can have our current and future superhero movies. I even read comments from people saying the movie doesn’t deserve the credit it gets for starting the superhero movie boom and instead we should credit Spider-man (if Marvel knocks Spidey: Homecoming out the park I suspect we will see a similar thing happen to the Raimi trilogy being considered embarrassingly bad). I’ll admit it got to me over the years and I feared my positive memories of them were in error. So I was happy that I still enjoyed them. X1 has some REALLY awkward exposition I feel but I think it’s heart shines through (at least for me). X2 (remember when EVERY nerd considered this the greatest superhero movie of all time?) continues to be a lot of fun, love that Bran Cox performance. X3 I never fully understood the hate other than at the time fans were furious Fox didn’t continue with Singer (man how times have changed…). I still enjoy it but do feel it is the least the trilogy and like Batman v Superman, it couldn’t decide on what story it wanted to do tell it did all of them.

    Re-watching them and reading this review was a nice trip down memory lane when it was exciting to watch these characters be realized and not know if it was going to work out but then accept them because they got to the heart of what made them work in the source material. Now everyone seems to think all pre-Iron Man superhero movies are garbage.

  2. I guess the hate of X3 stems from the Dark Phoenix story not being taken verbatim from the comics. I honestly had no problem with the way they handled it or the fact Jean killed Cyclops and the Professor. In the comics, Jean destroyed whole worlds with her powers. In the movies, Cyclops and Xavier ARE her worlds. It makes it more personal and heartbreaking that way.

  3. Yeah, I re-watched all the X-Men films recently as well and I was shocked to discover that I actually kind of love the series. It’s certainly my favorite non-Batman/non-Spider-Man/non-Blade set of superhero flicks. I hope they keep making them.

  4. I’ve watched 1 and 2 a few times throughout the years and consistently liked them. Three, though. Man. You’ve convinced me to give it a second chance. I’ll watch it sometime but I’m not holding my breath.

    My main problem with it was the treatment of Jean. I never read the comics, so it’s not that it’s different than those. It was just so bad. I hated that she was never her own person. First, she was Xavier’s student, then she was Magneto’s puppet, then she was Wolverine’s problem to fix. She needed to be a badass mother who swept the planet with her own rage for her own reasons and then redeem or sacrifice or burnout herself. But, I haven’t watched it since that first time, so maybe it’s not as bad as I’m remembering.

  5. I still think the biggest problem with part 3 is that it squeezes an epic story into 90 minutes, but you have to give it credit for still being highly entertaining and even actually good!

  6. yo minor point but the term is not “trans-gendered.” rather it is transgender, for the same reason we dont describe folks as being “gayed” or “Blacked” or “poored” or “paraplegicked”

  7. X3 would a fine movie if it wasn’t the closing chapter of the first x men trilogy.
    It very different in tone, and characters get the shaft in very swift and unsatisfying ways. This movie feels like fan fiction to me in some ways. I really don’t like it.
    I will always feel that the first two x men movies have never gotten a true resolution.

  8. rorolovo – “gendered” is a word though. You don’t have to make fun of me. At least I’m trying.

  9. I hated LAST STAND the first time because, one by one, it unceremoniously erased the characters we’d come to know and replaced them with a bunch of hopping blue nobodies in motorcycle jackets. I softened on the movie the second time, because the cure storyline is really interesting, but it’s still a wounded duck. The new characters never gel, and even, as Maggie pointed out, the returning ones often act off-brand, particularly Jean Grey, who becomes the passive, zombified MacGuffin in what is ostensibly her own story. More importantly (to me, anyway) the movie looks and feels cheap. The action is, quite simply, very poor, and much of that is due to the clumsy wirework that makes every mutant look like they have the same superpower: levitating awkwardly as if carried along by an invisible crane. I know the climax of the first X-MEN has not aged well but you have to give it credit for making do with the effects technology that was available at the time. LAST STAND has no such excuse. It was just a rushed, troubled production, and it shows in the half-assedness of the visuals. I do not blame Ratner for this. He took on a thankless task but I believe his heart was in the right place.

    In many ways, it’s an interesting movie but not a particularly good one. I have no animosity toward it but I don’t have much desire to revisit it.

  10. On a more positive note, I rewatched the first two after being the only person to think APOCALYPSE was damned entertaining and they certainly do hold up. There’s a confidence to the iconography that makes them feel instantly cinematic. It’s easy to see why this approach made the concept of costumed superheroes finally click with mass audiences: You don’t have to know anything about comic books to know that these people are obviously pretty cool. The first one plays more as a small-scale thriller of ideas these days, but the Nightcrawler sequence in X2 remains one of the finest superpower set-pieces in the genre. If the current nerds can’t appreciate these films then that’s their loss. Yet another joyous thing their blinkered approach to life and art will hide from them.

  11. Majestyk, I also thought APOCALYPSE was damned entertaining. So there’s two of us. Well, three counting the friend I saw it with.

    I haven’t watched the original X-MEN trilogy in a while but I remember liking all three of them.

    I remember thinking LAST STAND was a bit too cavalier about killing off major characters for no apparent reason other than to release later films from having to deal with them and/or the actors playing them. I think the movie just needed to make those deaths feel a little more dramatically earned.

    Otherwise I remember enjoying that third one just fine, and have never shared the hate.

    I’m also a fan of silky-voiced Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who in X3 has a small role as a doctor. She’s also in the already-hated-before-it-even-comes-out third film in the rebooted STAR TREK series. So I hope she doesn’t end up being perceived as the Ted McGinley of nerd trilogies.

  12. Good point, Curt. It’s not that I minded THAT they killed off characters. That’s actually a choice that I usually admire because it can give the proceedings more weight when you know that victory has a cost. It’s HOW they did it. None of the deaths seemed particularly dramatic or even important to the plot, and they seem even less so now that everybody is back and younger and prettier than before. Especially knowing that Cyclops got the shaft simply because of petty behind-the-scenes bullshit leaves a bad taste that the movie never fully recovers from.

  13. Kelsey Grammer as Beast remains my favorite superhero casting ever.

    I like most of the X-Men movies, but it always seems like they lack something. It’s as if the budget was cut at the last minute so shortcuts had to be made. The only ones that didn’t really feel that way were X2 and First Class (I haven’t seen Apocalypse yet). I do like what the first X-Men was able to do with its limited budget though. It feels like a television pilot that does a great job of introducing the context, the key characters, and the central conflict. If the actual X-Men shows are as good as X1, I’ll be happy.

  14. George Sanderson

    July 1st, 2016 at 4:59 pm

    As Vern rightly pointed out, the economy with which the first film introduces the main players, the idea of a mutant, and the stakes is really quite wonderful. It’s the kind of story-telling that does not usually come along with bloated budgets (and, obviously, running times).
    McKellen and Stamos are so great, especially in X2 and X3. The relationship between Magneto and Mystique is my favourite part of the first three movies and something I was hoping would be picked up more effectively in the second trilogy (I haven’t seen Apocalyose yet, so that might be the case).
    McKellen pointed out when he took the role he saw the parallels between the plight of the mutants and that of the LGBTQIA community, although the back then I think it was only referred to as the gay and lesbian community. His Magneto is my favourite comic book movie character.

  15. Curt- Shohreh Aghdashloo is awesome and really does have one of the all time great voices. Hopefully her work on the Mass Effect games will keep her from nerd McGinley status.

  16. I will never forget sitting in the theatre for the first X-Men movie and having the dawning realization that I was watching a watershed moment in genre filmmaking and that cinema was about to get very interesting.

  17. I absolutely loathed that first X-MEN movie. It made me feel bad for hyping it up months earlier that’s how disappointed I was. Funnily enough after seeing X2 on video I was disappointed that I did NOT watch it at the cinema and made me think the original’s wackness was a fluke. Then came THE LAST STAND which I wasted a free ticket on and still ended up wanting a refund. So yeah no real love for a trilogy that only had one good stand alone entry. Just way too much fluff.

  18. Ok so I actually sat through the first X-MEN for the first time in years and could honestly say that in my estimation it went from bad to just ok which is progress.

    Don’t know if it’s from all the years of enjoying some of it’s sequels and spinoffs and getting used to him but I found Wolvie much more likeable and relateable now. Before I thought he was just an asshole and not a loveable one like Parker or Hudson Hawk or something. Same with Magneto who outside of X2 and the Fassbender ones just seemed like a generic anti hero with no real depth besides crying about the holocaust.

    X2 is still the magic hour for the franchise while THE LAST STAND works even less for me now than it did back then. Just way too much going on for it’s own good. Should’ve just focused on Phoenix wrecking shit up.

  19. Jack Burton, that’s a good point that the hatred comes from the “half-assing” of the Dark Phoenix saga. But it’s both hypocritical and unfair… Especially when you consider that X3 doesn’t label itself as “Dark Phoenix,” so no one had any reason to expect an adaptation. It simply takes elements of that and other stories … Which is the same thing Nolan did in his celebrated Batman films… This summer’s Civil War was hardly a “faithful” adaptation of that comic book either. And it was, frankly, all the better for that and fans – generally – loved it.

    I’m with Vern on this one. And, in some ways, I think X3 is the “best” of the original trilogy. Because it has the best plot… And it feels like an actual X-Men movie with epic stakes (as opposed to just being “Wolverine And His Amazing Friends The X-Men Part 3”).

    The problem is it’s too short. There’s too much story for the 100 minute running time. It’s weird how X2 is basically just a rescue mission (with a second half that’s a real slog) and it goes on for like two and a half hours.

    X2 and X3 should have switched running times.

  20. Erix brings up a good point – complaining X3 overstuffs itself with both the Dark Phoenix storyline and the “Cure” storyline is like saying Batman Begins overreached and should have been just a straight adaptation of Batman: Year One and why they gotta add in all that Ra’s Al Ghul/Scarecrow stuff (which wasn’t in the comic). I’d argue most (non-comic savvy, non-internet savvy) people think X3 is perfectly fine; I’ve never met anyone in real life who has a problem with it (unlike Batman v. Superman or Superman Returns or Iron Man 2). I still think it’s weird that Game of Thrones/Walking Dead have a rabid fanbase and keep getting talked about at the water cooler because “ZOMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY KILLED SUCH AND SUCH” but the supposed biggest crime this movie does is kill such and such.

    Side note: I really love how people go “X3 is homophobic because Rogue would never do that to herself even though her power is useless and harmful 99% of the time, etc., if I had Rogue’s power I would never get rid of it, etc.. and it sickens me that this movie thinks gays should change who they are, etc. and that fat fuck Ratner, unlike Singer, is a straight guy who’s also a douchey poonhound so he just doesn’t get it man”. But now that it can be seen as a transgender parallel, can we now go back to those people and say “Who the hell are you to tell Rogue that she can’t use the advances of science to change her body to match the way she really feels inside despite what she was born with? What are you, some kind of transphobic asshole?” I think the fact that one can even have these thoughts about a 10 year old comic book movie shows how interesting X3 really is.

  21. Has anyone ever connected X-Men: The Last Stand to Nightbreed? In terms of volume of themed special effects characters all over the place. So many you don’t even know their names, necessarily. One has a guy with a crescent moon shaped head, the other has a guy with transparent skin, they both have porcupine people

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