We finally watched a popular movie this weekend, this movie being X Men Wolverine Claw: The Last Stand. I found this latest installment of the series fascinating as it reminds me of the progression of the cartoon series that I watched when I was a youngster. I want to make it perfectly clear to all of those comic book readers that I have never read an X-men comic book, thus I cannot compare anything to comic books and I personally think that's okay. So, in the TV series, the X-men plot started off as fairly normal things (for X-Men plots)...fighting intolerance and evil mutants. Over time however, they evolved into something a little weirder. I think mid-level weirdness was the man from the future that came to kill Wolverine becuse he was going to assassinate the president who was pro-mutant. This assassination would lead to an apocolyptic nightmare ala Terminator. I don't consider this "jumping the shark" (The point at which a TV show goes too far and loses credibility...this term supposedly comes from a Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumps a shark on waterskis, signalling the creative death of the show) as X-Men was weird anyway. A season or so later introduced us to the alien robot named Apocolypse who was all powerful. Then Jean Grey turned into the Phoenix. And then Professor X, Jean Grey and a whole bunch of psychics managed to banish Apocolypse to a different psychic plane or something to get rid of him. It was all a little too much. So, the series went from fairly normal cartoon fare to hightly complex and downright psychotic. I'm happy to report that the movie franchise has followed this same path. The first X-Men movie suprised me with how seemingly normal it was. The next one featured a little more weirdness. And this final one just blows you away with weirdness. By the end scene, Jean Grey has turned from a psychic to vindictive witch goddess clad in dominatrix gear. And she's giving that same look at Wolverine that Britney Spears would give before launching into one of her concerts. Geez, this could have been a great music video. There were all sorts of absurdities along the way and some pretty interesting stuff too. Unfortunately, the writing wasn't up to par. Wolverine's lines were very un-Wolverine, most notably there was the lack of the word "bub". I thought the potential plot line raised by Jean of the Professor getting in everyone's mind not just hers would have been an awesome trajectory. Cut to scenes of the Professor skulking around the school in his wheelchair giving people the whammy to make them all good nice people so they don't abuse their powers. Now THAT'S an ethical dilemma, mindblocks for the good of the students against their will to tame their ids. Awesome. Too bad the professor gets annhialated in the next scene so we'll never know if that's what he was doing (I was surprised that the professor was annhialated. Also in this one, we get Magneto stronger then he has ever been (why is this happening? Is he studying his powers to become stronger? Can mutants do this? Is he taking an anabolic steroid?) combined with his lamest group of henchmen we have ever seen. Maybe its because he's recruiting at mutant town hall meetings. Maybe its because all the good evil mutants are dead. But maybe, he's just lost the touch. He's really really proud that his top three mutants are...a woman who runs fast, a man with the powers of a...porcupine....seriously? Porcupine? He's scrapping to bottom of the barrel with this pick. Oh, he also has awesome man that can be in a million places at once....We haven't seen a group this bad since Skeletor assembled Merman, Beastman, and Tri-Klops to battle He-Man.
That's it. No conclusion.
2 comments:
I grew up very differently than you. One of the major differences was that your parents fed you. The major difference I would like to focus on however, has to do with you growing up with the X-Men. I have the feeling that you have a potentially different and nostalgic feeling toward the X-Men that I don't enjoy. Perhaps I'm more free to like what I like and dislike what I dislike.
I must admit not liking the very idea of the X-Men as a child yet these movies have captured my imagination and I even felt warm fuzzies in certain parts. So, having admitted to a certain level of love towards the show I must vocalize a conspectus of complaints. Do things ever seem so unpredictable that they become predictable? This paradox hit me especially hard in at least three separate instances. Instance 1, Jean Gray dies, but then, somehow she comes back to life (I'm still only about half aware of how that happened). Instance 2, Charles dies but there's that little blurb at the end which makes it seem like he's transferred himself into someone else. Instance 3, Magneto loses his powers, and then that little blurb at the end where he's managing to teeter a metal chess piece without touching it. My point here is that you can count on nothing actually staying constant. They're becoming predictable by killing mutants and bringing them back to life, losing powers and then perhaps getting them back again. I think it's OK to have a core set of mutants that never change, but on occasion I'm OK with seeing someone die and staying dead. I've rambled on now so much that I've forgotten my other complaints. But to end on a happier note, I still love the main story line, the special effects, the powers of certain mutants, etc.
Dude. I agree with you completely. The movie sucked. Frasier as The Beast? Seriously? And had the villians been Zartan, Tomax, Xamot, Major Blood and Destro—we would have been in decent shape.
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