SPOILERS AHEAD, YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
If you couldn't tell from my title, I'm not overly impressed with this movie.
I have not been really impressed with ANY of the X-Men movies. But this isn't the post for that. I will restrict myself to issues I have with this movie alone, or at least issues this movie presents. This will be SPOILER HEAVY!
Last time we saw him in a scene in a movie (not a post credit scene) he was disintegrated by Jean Grey/Phoenix in X-Men: Last Stand (X3.) Then there are 2 post credit scenes featuring him. One at the end of X3 where we hear Patrick Stewart's voice come out of the body of a man whose face we never see. Okay, so his consciousness jumped bodies. Next we see a full fledged Stewart in a post scene in The Wolverine, rolling through a mentally frozen airport like he was on a dirt bike. This movie takes place a few years after the events of X3.
We next see him in DoFP. It's roughly 2023 (because 1973 is said to be 50 years ago,) and he is again fully recovered and looking like himself, with his full power set. Never is his resurrection/healing mentioned. We are to just accept he is back normal. Good ol' Chuck.
2. Where Did Kitty's Mental Time Slide Powers Come From?
Kitty has been consistently portrayed (across 4 movies by 3 actresses) to have 'phasing' powers. Where she and anything she touches become intangible. Suddenly, in the 2023 future she now has the power to send peoples consciousness back in time. Now, it's a pretty cool power. But, what?
I can see the story telling point of keeping her directly involved with the mission because in the comics she was the one who went back in time. That's fine. But where did this new power come from? There is no explanation. It's just there. And the excuse that, "it's just a movie," or that "they all have powers, why does it matter?" do not fly with me.
The powers are central to these characters. They may not fully define them, but they play a huge role in shaping each character. Suddenly a character that has appeared in 3 previous movies has a new ability and it's not even addressed how or why. A simple line of, "Due to my secondary mutation that happened a few years agao..." or something of the like would have explained it nice and neat. That'd be like Wolverine showing up suddenly with retractable wings from his elbows, or Iceman shooting laser ice blasts. Okay, new powers, fine. Why?
3. If Mystique Is The Key to the Future Sentinels...
Why does it take 50 years to exterminate the mutants? What happened with Sentinels from 1973 to any movie so far, that never mentions the Sentinels (aside from the Danger Room sequence in X3.) As far as any movie released so far, the Sentinels have never existed. Granted, they didn't know where this was all going 14 years ago when they made the first movie. But I'm not going into that in this post.
If Mystique is the key, and basis for how the future Sentinels work, how do they mimic powers? Are they in fact mutants themselves? Also, they look freaking silly. I liked them in The World's End, not so much here.
4. 1973 Beast's Magic Drug
Professor X is in so much pain after being shot, 10 years ago, that beast works harder to help him than he did to fix himself. And what he comes up with is a heroin like drug that cancels out mutations, temporarily, and therefor allows Charlie to walk.
Seems legit. Again, I know this is a movie where people fly, have claws pop out of their...knuckles (ugh) and all sorts of crazy stuff. But this is just pissing in my cornflakes man. I get not wanting to have a major character stuck in a wheelchair for an action movie. It would have severely limited him, or been a challenge. Guess what, that's what life in a wheel chair does! Maybe that point should have been thought out before putting him in the chair in First Class. A big problem with all the X-Men movies is they race to the payoff moments with out thinking them through. Again, that's a separate post.
Yes, Prof X gets the use of his legs back many times in the comics. But in this movie, the explanation works until you think about it.
Beast uses the same drug to 'hide' his blue furry form. Again, you don't want to hide your actor behind make up for a whole movie...think about it before hand. Also, having him essentially 'Hulk-out' when he's angry and ready to fight is just plain insulting. Sure, let him use the drug to blend into society when they went to the Peace Summit, or whatever. But to have him constantly 'normal' until he's angry was just poor writing and a cheap way to avoid the make up chair. If you didn't want Beast to be a blue fur ball, shoulda waited.
This is dangerously close to the Worthington "cure" from X3. Just saying.
Not to mention that his make up looks completely different from First Class. It looks worse, more human less Beast.
5. Jennifer Lawrence...sigh
I think Lawrence is a great actor. She's done fantastic movies and has a brilliant career ahead of her. So what happened in this movie? Mystique has the emotional range of a teaspoon in this movie. She was woody and bland. And the whole plot hinging on her deciding which of the men she was to follow was kind of...lame. She was established to be strong willed and powerful in First Class, and now 10 years later she's so damaged by Magneto that she's just kind of bouncing around on her own crusade, until the fellas show up to confuse her. Cause, she's a girl and clearly can't make life choices of her own without a man on the other side of those decisions.
Mystique and Jennifer deserved a better story.
Positives
I would like to pause a moment and point out what I did like about this movie. I really enjoyed the way they portrayed Blink and her powers. She was always a cool character in the comics that seemed to not get enough room to play with the others. But the way they used her here was impressive.
Quicksilver was one of my biggest fears going into this movie. I still think his costume looks absolutely ridiculous, but he was the bright spot of the movie. To bad they treated him like paper cup to be used once and thrown away. But you don't want to cut down on the big action scenes where '73 Wolverine and Beast fight a Sentinel for about 30 seconds.
Jackman, Fassbender, and McAvoy deliver some of the best acting in the entire series.
We finally see Magneto ('73 Fasbender) become the mutant terrorist we know him to be. Ready to kill lots of homo sapiens for the sake of homo superior. The lifting of the stadium, working the metal into the Sentinels, and his whole attitude were fantastic (PS thanks for showing the climax of the movie in the trailers! I didn't see any of this coming.)
So, Mags has physical control over the big non-metal robots in 1973 because he works metal into their frames. Cool. That's bad ass. Turn their weapons against them. I can dig it. I'll even moderately accept that he can make the Gatling gun arm fire. But, here at the big climactic moment...he can voice command their functioning computer systems to target mutants? Really? (Also this is Mystiqe's finest moment of the movie, posing as Nixon, the guy they had playing Nixon was more emotionally engaging than Mystique through the rest of the movie.)
I was so into this scene until the computer thing happened. It makes no sense with in the context of the movie. Was it an out so Magneto wouldn't be personally responsible for attempting to kill Mystique by using the metal in the Sentinel? Or did he just randomly get control over computer systems like Kitty and her Mind Time Slide?
7. The Nitpick Section
All of Bryan Singer's little homages to himself/previous X-Men movies. The Danger Room "eye" opening. X's everywhere. Even Storm and Colossus' death's formed X's. Oh, yeah, and Colossus has metal skin right? Well, in this movie, his entire body is metal. He is ripped in half by Future Sentinels and instead of having gooey insides, it's that of solid metal. Possibly for ratings, sure. But why rip him in half, that was horrifying and unnecessary. That horrible funk music that was playing when Wolverine went out on the street in '73.
Wolverine telling Beast they were good friends. Really? Did you watch X3? They didn't seem to like each other! In fact, no one but Rogue and Jean seemed to like Wolverine in the previous movies. They seemed to put up with him while constantly being angry with him.
Bishop was a plot device who didn't say anything worth remembering. Warpath pretty much just snarled and flexed holding big knives. Storm was as pointless and ineffective as she has been in every movie, hardly befitting her true character. Iceman's ice slide was cool for about the 4 seconds of screen time it go. Did Sunspot even say anything?
And don't even get me started on this Sean Williams Scott/Kellan Lutz version of Stryker...
8. The Finale...and Apocalypse
I did not see this coming. So kudos for you keeping it under wraps. Somehow, by not killing Trask in '73 (an event that is never mentioned or discussed, despite it being the very epicenter of their bad future) everything goes right with the world. Jean doesn't go Phoenix crazy, therefore Cyclops and Prof X are fine too. Rogue shows up for 2 seconds just to hold hands with Iceman (who had been clearly with Kitty through all the Future story arc.) So, did the "cure" story in X3 never happen? What else never happened?
Granted, I like the scene with Prof X and Wolverine at the end. I would have been thrilled if that's all we saw off the 'fixed' future. While seeing Jean and Cyclops was a surprise, I have to wonder...why?
Then we cut to the post credits scene. Now, it's no secret Singer is doing an Apocalypse story next. So it makes sense that the post scene would reflect/suggest that. I wanted to be excited. I never thought I'd see Apocalypse on the big screen. But then I see Apocalypse on the big screen. He's making a pyramid with his mind like a kid with Lego bricks. The giant stones are just swirling around in the air like leftovers from Transformers 2. What? When is this happening? There is no context or reason to be interested. If you don't know who Apocalypse or En Sabah Nur are, you have no idea what is going on. Sure, the final shot of four dark horsemen on the next sand dune was cool, but I don't know why I should care.
Especially after the finale when everything seems hunky-dory. Apocalypse is supposedly going to be another First Class sequel, set in the 80's. Okay, but clearly they get through it just fine as shown in the finale. None of the major characters will be in serious jeopardy, and they all survive to get to that idyllic X-Mansion scene just moments ago, where...30 year old Rogue and Iceman are still students? Cause...is that a fixed 2023? or 2013? Who knows?
So there it is. I tried to keep my comic fanboy reeled in and work off mainly movie material. It's certainly not the worst X-Men movie out there. But I don't really consider any of them to be good. And I'll tell you why next time.
For now, thanks for reading...if you made it this far.
-Jesse
No comments:
Post a Comment