X-Men: The Last Stand (DANGER! Spoilers!)
The author wishes to thank her kind and tolerant friends for letting her vent/detox after the movie, especially Dan, who reminded her to get her car, and DJ, who reminded her to fill it with gas. Without them, she literally wouldn't have made it home.
Okay. I -- No. Where do I start? I thought Goblet of Fire was fast-paced. That only crammed an 800-page novel into two and a half hours. Last Stand tries to cram several years' worth of comic books into 104 minutes. You're barely given time to breathe, let alone grieve -- and enough people die in this movie that you'd have plenty to grieve about if you could.
I knew we were in trouble from the start. The style of the first two movies' gradual openings was gone, replaced by inappropriately heroic music and flashbacks far less effective than the first movie's. The most exciting four or five minutes occurs in the first quarter of the movie, in which Logan is appropriately witty and we see the introduction of the Fastball Special. (No mention of how Rogue, Colossus, Shadowcat and Iceman suddenly got qualified to join the team, but fine, time has passed.)
When the movie first ended, I thought my problem was with the plot. But as we talked it over, I realized that it wasn't that. Sure, there were plot holes, but in general I was willing to buy whatever explanations they offered. No, I realized that my problem was with Brett Ratner, and anyone else responsible for directing, scripting or producing this movie. In an effort to get as many faces onscreen as possible, they let all depth of character, intellect or emotion fall by the wayside. But hey, stuff blows up!
Yep. Stuff blows up. Houses, islands, people -- disintegrated, obliterated, annihilated. Lots of people die, and a few come back to life, depending on how you define die. Your typical summer blockbuster. One reviewer described it as Michael Bay's Schindler's List. (If you didn't get the joke, think "Schindler's List with lots of explosions.") More accurately it was X-Men: Rush Hour! Cramasmanyscenestogetherasyoucanbecauseourmindnumbedaudiencedhasnoattentionspan.
Bryan Singer, I'm very disappointed in you. I hope you're sorry for what you've done. Your presence as director lured some fine actors into the franchise, and you made two good movies -- exciting, emotional, intellectually challenging. And you just had to go after Superman, didn't you? They dangle a lot of money and the greatest comic book property in history in front of you, and you just abandon your baby. Who are you, Magneto?
Seriously, this story had a lot of potential. The "cure" that incites Magneto's war was a great narrative device (the announcement of and reaction to which felt completely cribbed from Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, but hey): it's the crux of the mutant issue. We knew Jean Grey would be back -- or at least, fans of the comic who noticed the fire in the water at the end of X2 knew she would be back -- and I was satisfied with the explanation they used here.
But she, like every other mutant in the story, has been reduced to her most cardboard cutout: she stands around looking menacing and the universe disintegrates around her. Magneto is the bad guy, Callisto is his new flunky, Storm is responsible, Xavier is an idealist, Cyclops is heartbroken, Wolverine is heartbroken and angry (making him the deepest character in the film), Mystique is clever (she actually has another trait as well, suggesting that perhaps she and Logan were meant for each other after all), Rogue is lovesick, Iceman is the nice guy, Pyro is a hothead, Juggernaut's a meathead (totally misused as the comic relief), Colossus doesn't even have a personality trait, he's just steel. You see? The fact that I can even write this list is a problem.
Sure, I'm glad Storm has better lines than "okay" and "let's go," but they waste a whole minute of the movie walking around in the fog, only to have Logan finally complain that he can't see, and another thirty seconds while the special effects guys clear away the fog. I mean, at the time, it seemed like it was setting a mood and I appreciated the pacing, but in retrospect it was a terrible waste. Porcupine-face got more screentime than Cyclops, and Pf doesn't even have powers, just bad fashion sense! It's not like scenes with real emotion are expensive! No F/X there, guys! Just people acting! You know, like films used to have! The strength of Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, and, heck, the first two X-movies, was the fact that they put real people into the situation. They hired good actors to exist in a deep story. Ratner just blows stuff up.
There is no ending. Almost like Phoenix - Endsong (reviewed previously), by the end of the credits (for which you should stick around), they've narratively undone almost everything they accomplished in the story. What little emotion I was able to work up at the end was betrayed. Ha! You shouldn't have grieved or felt sorry for any of them! Gotcha! (Which, ironically, is a totally Singerian, Usual Suspects feeling...) But Endsong had beauty to make up for its deficiencies, and Last Stand has...um... well, the women are beautiful, except for Phoenix (not the same as Jean), who's insanely creepy. The Jean Grey/Phoenix music is cool, but the moments are uneven. The script doctoring (he wanted out, she wanted a bigger role) is too obvious.
I mean, I liked the movie. It was entertaining. I'll buy it on DVD. I'd listen to the soundtrack. But it could've been great, and it was barely good! If you're gonna be a movie franchise, be Harry Potter or Spiderman, where each entry gets better, even if you change directors. Don't be The Matrix.
5 Comments:
First, let me say that I enjoyed the movie, and like Abigail, I will probably buy the DVD, if only to complete my collection.
Second, let me add that I'm the kind of person who purposely tries not to pick a movie apart while I'm watching it. I prefer to engage my superhero-like powers of “willing suspension of disbelief” to let myself become more engrossed in the storyline. Now, that being said, I had a hard time with a couple of things, the first of which that comes to mind was the fog scene. It was so thick you couldn't see potential danger, which any idiot would’ve been looking for, given the professor’s urgent command to go there. I was wondering to myself, "Why doesn’t Storm clear this out? Does she have an unrevealed reason for leaving it there? Is something preventing her from clearing it away?" I wondered this for what seemed like a long time before Wolverine pointed out the thickness of the fog to Storm—who promptly agreed and cleared it up. Good thing Wolverine was there to tell the WEATHER WITCH that the fog was too thick to see through.
Next, I have to say, Magneto kicks butt. I think a lot of the actor, Ian McKellan, who has played the part very well in all 3 X-Men movies, and as a result he has given me a greater appreciation of this character. Bravo!
However, I've always been fascinated by physics, and I took these classes in both high school and college. Unseen but measurable forces such as gravity and magnetism have always interested me in particular. Now the force of the magnetic field required to lift a car (against the pull of gravity) and then crush it is prodigious, to say the least. A magnetic field takes energy to create and there are formulas in physics for the amount required. The human body can produce energy via chemical reactions. Chemical reactions can produce significant amounts of energy—just look at some of the modern explosives you see in the movies. With these two facts in mind, I can let my “willing suspension of disbelief” take control of the part of my mind that is trying to roughly calculate how strong a magnetic field would have to be in order to crush a car.
But moving an incredibly massive object such as the San Francisco bay bridge makes it extremely hard for me to tune out this part of my brain when it is yelling at me like the professor in Back to the Future at the amount of electricity required to power the flux capacitor! Even in the comic books I think they might have shied away from a feat of this magnitude. And if they did it anyway, they surely would’ve followed it up with either an explanation of “Magneto’s temporarily heightened abilities” or at least showing him feeling a bit tired from stress of such an activity. Remember the scene in the first X-Men movie where he first powered the mutation device and the strain was so much it nearly killed him? But he moved the San Francisco bay bridge a few miles without even breaking a sweat? Come on! It has to weigh AT LEAST SEVERAL MILLION TONS! The magnetic force required to move an object of such great mass (without affecting anything else metal in the vicinity, mind you) coming from a man of his stature left me looking around the theater while waiting for the “believable” part of the story to continue. It was totally unexpected. What did I expect? I expected Magneto to take a bunch of the cars and crush them into a large disc, or a bunch of small discs, that his mutant army would ride on much like he did in X2 when he escaped his plastic prison. But no, they had to go for some over-the-top theatrics and move the whole darn bridge.
So while I don’t normally like to pick a movie apart while I’m watching it, I have no qualms about doing so afterward. As Abigail pointed out, the plot was lacking and the characters were like lifeless cardboard cutouts (through no fault of the talented actors and actresses in the movie who have already proved themselves in previous movies).
But hey, there were lots of big explosions. ;-)
Yeah, it's usually a bad sign if you start thinking physics in the middle of the movie. X1 and X2 were good enough that they didn't trigger the disbelief I was so consciously suspending (like Leorex, I prefer to submerge myself into the world of the movie). Most of my picking apart I did afterward, too, and I suspect I'll like it more the second time I see it, when I don't have such high expectations.
Now, now. To be fair, Singer might see the great need the Superman franchise has for a shot in the arm. The first Superman movie was great, the second was pretty good, and the third and fourth were laughable, and it killed the franchise. Now, when people think of the Superman movies, they think of how ridiculous 'The Quest for Peace' was.
Maybe Singer thought, 'I've been able to bring life back to the superhero genre and I've got X-Men standing on its own two feet -- I'm needed elsewhere, now.'
No doubt he did! He did indeed. But the quote continues, "I didn't know they were going to give it [the X-men franchise] to some jerk who'd reduce it to character hackery and explosions!"
Hi
Nice blog i like it thanks for this kind information
Post a Comment
<< Home