X-Men 3: The Last Stand
May. 23rd, 2006 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe usual disclaimer: I've been an X-Men fan for a long time - since before they were a fan favourite. I loved them when they were struggling along on the verge of cancellation, when a run of some 20 issues were reprints of earlier ones, when the canonical team was Cyclops, Beast, Ice-Man, Angel and Marvel Girl; and I loved them when desperate measures saw them re-launched as an international team, and they started to gain popularity.
One of the reasons for their success was Chris Claremont's writing, with its emphasis on characters and relationships, and its soap opera style storylines. X-Men wasn't Watchmen and it wasn't Sandman, but it was more complex and more richly emotional than we were used to superhero comics being. There were some very silly stories, but there were some great ones, too.
And the third X-Men film dives into this emotionally highly charged material, but it does so with the baggage of thirty years of continuity and discontinuity, thirty years of false starts and second guesses, of fannish devotion to the details of canon and of denials of history. I couldn't disentangle this even if I wanted to, because these days I don't keep up with a fraction of the X-titles, of the alternate histories and probabilities, of who is dead and who anyone's parents are. So I come to the movie with my own mixture of familiarity and ignorance.
And here I am again talking about a film in terms of its source material; but this time it seems justified by the film itself. V for Vendetta stood alone as a political thriller / action movie - it borrows the plot and visual style of its original, but not necessarily its audience. The X-Men movie franchise seems to speak directly to the fans, inviting us not just to recognise its heros, but also to identify every last character (The leader of the group of punks - is that Callisto? That rather sinister politician - oh, his name's Trask, is it?). Some plot details are spelled out less clearly than they might have been, because we are assumed to know them, from the previous movies if not from the comics ("Remind me," said Gail-Nina, "What is Rogue's mutant ability?").
Is it possible to spoiler a movie where the tension is not about what will happen, but about which recension of the legend we are going to see, and how it will be handled? I think not, I think that The Last Stand works best for an audience who know pretty much what is going to happen.
Briefly, because when I try to be less brief, I find myself doing scene-by-scene analysis: the Phoenix saga is quite neatly knitted into the rest of the plot, but at the cost of all the grandeur and scope of the story. The SF element has gone, and while we are told that Phoenix is incredibly powerful, we never actually see her devouring planets. It would be unkind, but not untrue, to say that you can tell when Phoenix is using her powers because water boils and she goes very red in the face. This can be effective: a battle of wills between Jean and the Professor is everything that the confrontation of Gandalf and Saruman should have been and wasn't. But it's still more teenage poltergeist than Phoenix.
The idea that mutant powers could be "cured" (a recent storyline in the comics) was emotionally effective - there was lirtle attempt to make it plausible (and I can see that might have been difficult) and the shift from good intentions to bad was maybe a bit rapid, but the range of reactions from Rogue, from Storm, from the Beast were believable and touching (Kelsey Grammer's Hank McCoy was terrific, though it was a bit of a shock to see him so much older than the others - the movies do not observe the age cohorts of the comics). And the film ended with some familiar characters permanently "cured", some voluntarily, some involuntarily, which gave a very satisfying sense of finality, as much so as the deaths of major characters. I hope the dead stay dead, and the cured stay cured, and I wish I could believe they will.
ETA: At much too late last night, I was staring at this, wondering why so much of it was talking around the subject, and so little actually engaging with the film. The light of morning brings the answer: it isn't that I can't review the movie without spoilers, it's that I can't review it at all. What I want to write is not a review, balancing the pretty effects against the huge holes in the plot, the good acting and characterisation against the great actors having altogether too much fun. All I can tell someone who hasn't seen the film is that if you like the X-Men, and can tolerate the degree of reworking they regularly suffer in the comics medium, you'll probably feel the film does them justice. I can't imagine what it offers to people who aren't already fans - the group I saw it with were mixed in their reactions. But what I want to do (are you listening,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samarcand?) is talk to someone who knows this material about how particular scenes (and characters, and costumes) work.
Oh, and a word of advice: because we were with a group, we went against our usual habit and left before the end of the credits. This may have been a mistake...
One of the reasons for their success was Chris Claremont's writing, with its emphasis on characters and relationships, and its soap opera style storylines. X-Men wasn't Watchmen and it wasn't Sandman, but it was more complex and more richly emotional than we were used to superhero comics being. There were some very silly stories, but there were some great ones, too.
And the third X-Men film dives into this emotionally highly charged material, but it does so with the baggage of thirty years of continuity and discontinuity, thirty years of false starts and second guesses, of fannish devotion to the details of canon and of denials of history. I couldn't disentangle this even if I wanted to, because these days I don't keep up with a fraction of the X-titles, of the alternate histories and probabilities, of who is dead and who anyone's parents are. So I come to the movie with my own mixture of familiarity and ignorance.
And here I am again talking about a film in terms of its source material; but this time it seems justified by the film itself. V for Vendetta stood alone as a political thriller / action movie - it borrows the plot and visual style of its original, but not necessarily its audience. The X-Men movie franchise seems to speak directly to the fans, inviting us not just to recognise its heros, but also to identify every last character (The leader of the group of punks - is that Callisto? That rather sinister politician - oh, his name's Trask, is it?). Some plot details are spelled out less clearly than they might have been, because we are assumed to know them, from the previous movies if not from the comics ("Remind me," said Gail-Nina, "What is Rogue's mutant ability?").
Is it possible to spoiler a movie where the tension is not about what will happen, but about which recension of the legend we are going to see, and how it will be handled? I think not, I think that The Last Stand works best for an audience who know pretty much what is going to happen.
Briefly, because when I try to be less brief, I find myself doing scene-by-scene analysis: the Phoenix saga is quite neatly knitted into the rest of the plot, but at the cost of all the grandeur and scope of the story. The SF element has gone, and while we are told that Phoenix is incredibly powerful, we never actually see her devouring planets. It would be unkind, but not untrue, to say that you can tell when Phoenix is using her powers because water boils and she goes very red in the face. This can be effective: a battle of wills between Jean and the Professor is everything that the confrontation of Gandalf and Saruman should have been and wasn't. But it's still more teenage poltergeist than Phoenix.
The idea that mutant powers could be "cured" (a recent storyline in the comics) was emotionally effective - there was lirtle attempt to make it plausible (and I can see that might have been difficult) and the shift from good intentions to bad was maybe a bit rapid, but the range of reactions from Rogue, from Storm, from the Beast were believable and touching (Kelsey Grammer's Hank McCoy was terrific, though it was a bit of a shock to see him so much older than the others - the movies do not observe the age cohorts of the comics). And the film ended with some familiar characters permanently "cured", some voluntarily, some involuntarily, which gave a very satisfying sense of finality, as much so as the deaths of major characters. I hope the dead stay dead, and the cured stay cured, and I wish I could believe they will.
ETA: At much too late last night, I was staring at this, wondering why so much of it was talking around the subject, and so little actually engaging with the film. The light of morning brings the answer: it isn't that I can't review the movie without spoilers, it's that I can't review it at all. What I want to write is not a review, balancing the pretty effects against the huge holes in the plot, the good acting and characterisation against the great actors having altogether too much fun. All I can tell someone who hasn't seen the film is that if you like the X-Men, and can tolerate the degree of reworking they regularly suffer in the comics medium, you'll probably feel the film does them justice. I can't imagine what it offers to people who aren't already fans - the group I saw it with were mixed in their reactions. But what I want to do (are you listening,
samarcand?) is talk to someone who knows this material about how particular scenes (and characters, and costumes) work.Oh, and a word of advice: because we were with a group, we went against our usual habit and left before the end of the credits. This may have been a mistake...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 09:32 am (UTC)However, having said that, my X-Men experience is probably less broad than yours. It was the first comic I started to collect and I managed to re-read a lot of the early Claremont/Byrne stuff in the Classic X-Men series and then dropped it when Claremont left the first time, which was some time in the early nineties. I didn't start to read it again until Grant Morrison started up with New X-Men. However, I do know the Dark Phoenix saga pretty well. The cure for mutation is the Joss Whedon storyline from Astonishing, isn't it?
What would be fun is to get the DVD when it comes out and then sit there with the Dark Phoenix collection and mt Astonishing hardcover and play 'spot the swipe'. (Easier to do with Sin City, probably...)
And I'll let you know what you missed at the end of the credits!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 10:37 am (UTC)Like a pair of sad fanboys. (It sounds wonderful - let's do it).
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 10:43 am (UTC)We're not fanbois. We're fangrrrls!
No. Probably not, actually.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-03 09:17 pm (UTC)I haven't been following Buffy, but I think it's an absolutely fair point, and an interesting one - I've posted about it separately, rather than go on at length here.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-04 02:16 am (UTC)