On Looking Into Ratner's X-MEN

[thatcrazycajun]

Some thoughts after seeing X-MEN: THE LAST STAND... :

- On Magneto's (Sir Ian McKellen) ranting address to his troops in the forest: One would think a man who grew up under the rule of Adolf Hitler would know better than to turn into him...or at least look and sound like him when giving a speech. All he lacked was a translation to German and a copy of "Mein Kampf" under his arm.

- Why, oh, why did they have to kill off so many key characters? To defy "oh, they won't kill him/her off" expectations? To heighten drama and realism? Just because they could? And between Jean Grey's resurrection and the apparent survival of another "deader," death in the Marvel movie universe doesn't really seem to mean all that much. And a third is supposedly dead, though we never actually get to see him die, nor do we see a corpse. (Of course, then again the comic books are even worse about letting dead characters stay dead, so I suppose we should consider this an improvement...)

- On the film's opening "twenty years ago" sequence: Big-time kudos to the makeup folks for doing such a good job of taking two decades off the faces of Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian. But a rap on the knuckles to the CGI team for making Beast/McCoy's hair grow back on his hand so fast after withdrawing from Leech's immediate proximity. (Or was that really Mystique?) Unless rapid hair growth was part of McCoy's mutant ability, that wouldn't happen in reality, as my ever-thoughtful partner Mary points out.

- I can understand if Alan Cumming didn't want to endure the excruciating hours-long makeup job for playing Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler again. But couldn't the writers have at least made up some excuse for the absence from the third film of a major print-canon character? Have Cyclops say "Since Kurt went off to seminary/jail/'find himself'..." or some such. After going to such trouble to introduce him in X2, it's jarring to have him suddenly gone in this film and all the others act as if he'd never been there.

- A check of imdb.com corrected my error, but just for a few minutes there, I thought the guy playing Warren "Angel" Worthington III's corporate-mogul father was William B. "Cancer Man" Davis from THE X-FILES. Too bad it wasn't; he'd have been a great choice for the role.

- Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. keeps insisting this is the last X-MEN film. Take a look at the box office returns so far and tell me you still think they won't try milking this cash-cow at least one more time. Especially with that little stunt they pulled at the very, very end after the last credits had rolled... Trust me, there WILL be another one.

Comments

[the-gwenzilliad.livejournal.com]

It's nearly impossible to completely ignore visible text. There's this nifty thing called an lj-cut that you can apply to text in order to hide what's beneath; I use them all the time.

It's in the LJ FAQ.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I read no further than "If you hate spoilers..."

Matt, m'friend, lj-cut is your friend. Please use it.

[mneme]

An lj-cut is, in fact, a necessity if you're going to post spoiler text.

(no, I won't notice; I turn off cuts on my friends page, but that's my risk).

Re Nightcrawler: clearly, there's a limit of one blue guy per movie.

Killing characters: Jean was a necessity. Professor X, I'm convinced, was a combination of "for the shock value" and "so we don't have to deal with the Professor's powers for this movie" -- though they had to bring him back simply because Xavier is more or less synonymous with the X-men (you didn't think the X stood for X-factor, did you? :). Scott...was gratuitous, I agree, especially since they didn't bother to do so in a way where they -couldn't- bring him back easily without even yer usual marvel explaination. (after all, there's clearly another reason for Jean's "rule-altering field" to have manifested other than killing Scott -- she'd have used it to supress his powers).

I hated the explaination for Phoenix. I mean "her supressed personality?" Please.

I didn't mind the leech stuff -- sudden transformations (despite Angel's slow and resisted one in the movie) are a conciet of these things, so if Beast loses his hair when he enters the field, I can well believe that he suddenly regrows it when he leaves -- if he could stay shaved, he might consider it, but presumably, he can't.

Agreed on how "last" this movie is. And it's not like, with way too many years of comics to mine, that they don't have more story possiblities lined up, even having rejected the whole cosmic/interstellar aspect of the comics.

Oh, and I rather liked the Sentinel fake out at the beginning, though it was, perhaps, a bit -too- close, given.