I didn't find much to like - the film was an overwrought, overlong mess of poor acting, poor characters and characterization, poor humor and a bland story. There were minor surface level problems, but then there were deeper issues I had with the story they were trying to tell.
Minor issues:
- They used some random house in England to stand in for the mansion, rather than filming for a day or two in Vancouver at Hatley Castle. As annoying as the change to the Alkali complex in XMOW.
- They used Gnarles Barkley for a dance club scene set almost fifty years before the song was even written.
- Since when can Beast run at super speeds?
- X1 continuity altered: Moira invents the term "X-Men", rather than the kids at the school. Beast develops Cerebro, not Magneto (perhaps Magneto will physically build the Cerebro we know in a sequel). Xavier learns of the thought-blocking helmet, but 40 years later has no idea how Magneto is shielding himself.
- What happens to the special booth if normal customers sit there and set a glass down on the magic button? "Whoops, shouldn't have put my drink there!"
- I thought Banshee flew through a continual use of his sonic scream - how does he manage his turn upwards once he's stopped screaming?
- Also on Banshee, while I'll buy he can bounce his scream off a sub like sonar, how does he read it once the waves come back at him?
- Why, exactly, can't Darwin "adapt" to what Shaw does to him?
- If you've got the tech to build jets and Cerebro and laser-blasting chest diffusers, why is your television giving out the most scrappy, aged, vintage display? Is it because Magneto turned the satellite dish and messed up your reception?
- Why wasn't Mystique's voice, in her blue form, the electronic form that she has in X1, X2 and even X3? I thought the point was that, just how she has no "original" human form, she has no real original human voice, and that was a nice touch. Nevermind.
- Why couldn't Emma transform back into diamond after the fight with Xavier and Magneto - because he'd caused a flaw in the diamond and it could shatter, I'm assuming ("just tap her")? But why can she transform back later in the film?
- Why didn't Emma escape her government captors, given she could not only use her diamond abilities to break through the glass, but has mental powers that presumably could have controlled or confused the men involved?
- Is Mystique really super-strong enough to catch the weights when they drop on her, and with no seeming effort or even a bend of the arms as she strains?
- The tone was more campy than I expected. Way more James Bond/Austin Powers than I'd hoped, or ever would've pegged for an X-Men movie.
Bigger problems:
- The villains in this movie were like a carbon copy of the Brotherhood in X1, right down to their roster and ultimately their world-devastating plot. The Brotherhood consisted of a powerful megalomaniac, a right hand woman with a strange visual form and a bit of martial arts, a funny-colored guy with some speed and agility on his side and a bit of a brute who almost never speaks a line of dialogue - and yes, that's Shaw, Emma Frost, Azazel and Riptide that I'm describing. Their archetypes, their relationships, the three men and one woman lineup - it was all really familiar. And their big plan? A radiation machine, which will leave mutants unaffected (apparently, as Shaw claims, mutation has only developed as a result of radiation, so... all of the X-Men have at some point been exposed to radiation, I guess) but will devastate the rest of the world; for Shaw, it will kill humans, and for Magneto, it will mutate them. I think Magneto's idea is actually a bit more clever, given it would make the world like him and force mutants into the majority, rather than just killing people for killing's sake. And the reason why Magneto has this hatred of the world has a compelling, emotional backstory - I was never really sure why Shaw wanted to kill everyone, other than the standard movie villain "must take over the world" desire. Magneto's ties to a real-world genocide gave that universe such a serious tone, and it was a move that I loved compared to Spider-Man (where industrial accidents turn men into super villains); but Shaw was just some rich weirdo, a la Lex Luthor, and had no obvious motivation. If Shaw's goal was also mutant superiority, then I have to say that they not only copied Magneto as a villain but made their copy inferior. In-universe, of course it would appear that Magneto is the one ripping off Shaw, right down to a machine that he grips tightly and is powering/powered by, but in the real universe, it's the writers just repeating a plot we've already seen.
- The minor characters, especially the kids, were a cast of uninspired choices from the comics. Admittedly, there are some classics (Banshee, Havok), but then there are the weird ones - Angel, Darwin. Who chose to pursue these characters instead of the "first students" Xavier had in the first film, like Jean, Storm and Cyclops? I guess casting was an issue, because you could've made a bunch of thirteen-year-olds play these characters in your first film, but if you turned it into a trilogy (or more) you'd quickly realize none of these kids were growing up to look like Famke, Halle or James once they hit their 20s. So they went with other characters - but still, there are characters people love and know better than Angel or Darwin. Gambit? Psylocke? Heck, if you're discounting X3, even the original Angel could've been there instead. And while X1 took characters I never gave a damn about in the comics and made me really like them (Cyclops, Jean, Wolverine), XMFC hasn't made me care whatsoever about either of those two. Their inclusion feels a little pointless and like a wasted opportunity.
- Mystique. I'm not a stickler for comic canon; I wasn't bothered by the changes to somebody like Rogue in X1. So I'm not bothered by the idea, in principle, that she was Xavier's adopted sister; I just think it was executed poorly. She just so happens to break into Xavier's house, which is a lucky coincidence for them both (where were his real parents, btw? Who agreed to let her stay all that time?), and becomes his little sister. She gets to live the good life, rides his coat tails to Oxford, and essentially spends 18 years by his side. I can somewhat understand how she began to feel like she was the third wheel when Xavier was trying to pick up girls, although not why she wanted him to have a romantic interest in her after growing up as his sister all that time - but I can't buy that his lack of interest in her was enough to push her to Magneto's side as soon as he tells her to accept that her blue breasts are "exquisite". They put no effort into showing us whether Mystique was a proponent of Xavier's ideas of equality; I can only assume that all that time that she lived with him, she secretly harbored resentment towards human beings (although she makes no mention of having been scared to go to school as a child, or what her life was like before), in order for her to suddenly accept the fact that Magneto was willing to kill "thousands of innocent men". This was such a sudden leap, and I can't believe she switched sides so easily given how long she lived with Xavier and how close I assume that would have made them. I think it makes more sense, character-wise, for Mystique to have been a damaged young girl who was tortured or threatened by humans, and was scared - like she said in X1 - and was found by Magneto and offered a life of safety and superiority. I can't buy that she was that scared little girl, and then had nearly two decades of living in a rich mansion with no need to ever steal food again, and then decided that she'll chuck it all in to side with a guy who tells her she's pretty. It makes her so one-dimensional, especially after Magneto likens her to a tiger and calls her a creature - and she then tells Xavier that he's the one who views her like a pet. What? Who's the one treating her like an animal here?
- Emma Frost was a total waste. I will never understand the appeal of the diamond form, given I thought her greatest strengths were her demeanor and her conviction. She was the kind of woman I thought you wouldn't want to cross because she was tough, not because she can turn into a diamond and beat you up. Yes, she has her telepathy in this film, but she's more useful when she's cutting ice off an icecap to put into your drink. The character was so unlike what I expected of Frost that I wish she hadn't been in the film. The rumor of Sigourney Weaver for the role back in the days of X2 made me assume they had plans for a strong woman who would've gone head-to-head with Xavier or Jean based on sheer force of will, and she's been reduced to a girlfriend who wears as much lingerie as possible.
- Speaking of lingerie, was there a woman in this film who didn't run around either naked, or in panties, at some point? No, there wasn't. Emma uses her mental powers to mentally make out with a Russian, and sits on the sideline watching him make a fool of himself - but both her mental projection and her real self are stripped to bra and panties. Why? Couldn't her projection have stripped while she stayed clothed? I guess the film needed even MORE **** and ass on display; it further reduces Emma's character, which is a shame. The closest you get to male flesh is a small circle of Havok's chest, because apparently writer Jane Goldman thinks women find men more appealing with clothes on than off. Obviously not the same case for the women. I'm not suggesting that the men should have all stripped, just questioning why all the women had to. Forget even trying to apply the Bechdel test to this film, since it would fail (not that the other X-films were that fantastic, but the girls just didn't seem so sexualized to me). And Moira - poor Moira - reduced to a memory of a kiss, and then the butt of a joke about women not having a place in the CIA.
- The kids felt underutilized and poorly tacked into the movie. In the first films, the kids were - rightly - treated as children by the adults, who were the responsible ones who were trained to go out and save the day. Rogue was involved in the plot by dint of being kidnapped by Magneto due to her powers, and the kids expressed in X2 that they still had need of adults, for safety and guidance and help. Here, the kids are little more than a way to track a few more kids into the theatre - teen appeal - while acting as members of the army that Xavier and Magneto need to put together... why? In X3 (and I'm no huge fan of X3, believe me), the only reason they let the younger members tag along was because Magneto had assembled an army. Shaw has no army, and I can't believe that the kids, untrained as they were, were going to be that much of a help compared to Magneto and Xavier. After we first meet them, they are victims of an attack on the compound (thank god we knew it was a Covert CIA Research Base due to the endless location subtitles), but they never lift a finger to use their powers, instead choosing to run screaming until the very end - and then only one or two even think about fighting back. I tried to forgive this, telling myself, "they're kids, not warriors, just the same as they were in the other films". Except that five minutes later, they're not scared, they're subject to a terribly split-screened training montage which transforms them from the helpless kids they were into the battle-ready X-Men with a little cliched motivational figurative prostate massaging from Xavier. That's all it takes for Havok to learn to aim his powers, and for Banshee to learn to navigate and turn and land while he flies? Thank god it's that easy, and thank god that the Americans, the Russians and the Hellfire Club decided to hold off their approach to WW3 while they took a couple of days to train themselves.
- Perhaps the most disappointing part of the film, storytelling-wise, is the way they portrayed the relationship between Magneto and Xavier. I would have thought, based on the comics (and, somewhat, cartoons) and the first films that these two men had once been friends. I'd imagine they had found one another, each the only other mutant they'd ever come across, and that this formed a bond between them - that they were both young, educated and intelligent men with gifts beyond scope and a common goal to try and help the world. And somewhere along the way, after perhaps a few years (or months, if need be) of this friendship, there was some kind of fracture and they split on either side of the human versus mutant debate. A debate that they barely touch upon in this film, seemingly because it's better to set up the "surprise" that Magneto actually agrees with Shaw, hates human beings and would happily kill them all. They spend much of the film being friendly (but not great friends), but hardly discussing their varying sides of the issue on whether mutants are superior or not, which was the foundation of their relationship and argument in the first film. What unites them in this film is only a common goal of taking down Shaw, and perhaps one scene in which Xavier really helps Magneto (with a memory). They're not the only two mutants, alone in the world, given that they find at least ten others within days of even meeting each other. They're not shown to be with one another out of any great respect, or even like, for one another; they're just associates, working together. Magneto breaks down after paralyzing Xavier, as though he's just lost a dear friend - although he's only known him for a few weeks. Did he expect they would remain friends after his trick with the missiles? What would have driven them to work alongside one another, given Magneto's feelings all along were that he hated humans and that he barely broached the idea of mutant superiority with Xavier - such a huge issue, for them both, but something they couldn't discuss because it would have immediately made them realize they could not be friends. Instead, they're forced together for the sake of a government operation, and we're told that they were friends once, even though it only consisted of being acquaintances for a few weeks back in 1962. Not the friendship I imagined, at all - the one where I assumed they had perhaps founded the school together properly, that Magneto had helped build Cerebro so they could both find mutants and help to train them (and thus, would have learned that curved metal plays some part in telepathy and known that making a mini-Cerebro to fit around his head might block Charles), and defected later, causing a traumatic split for two men who had been great friends. It might have worked better if, after the Nazi occupation and the end of the war, Erik had escaped to England and found Charles as a young boy, and the two had grown up together as adopted siblings in the way that Xavier and Mystique did. Then, the war between these two "brothers" might have had some impact, and their falling out might have meant something more than "Oh, hi, nice to meet you, sorry to hear you want to kill the human race, bye now".
Positives:
- Fassbender as Magneto did a better job than I'd expected, and I was really enamored of the character. I didn't notice his accent slips as much as the friends I saw the movie with, and I thought his revenge quest was not only emotionally interesting but made for exciting viewing in a very Kill Bill way. In fact, I think he probably could have driven his own movie centered around that story; perhaps one in which Mystique could have played a better, and different role, and come to his side in a different way (for example: she works as a CIA agent, mirroring her government involvement in the Dept of Defense from the comics, and she "hides" amongst humans that she secretly fears... until her work puts her on the trail of Magneto, whose international death wish revenge scheme has drawn attention, and she follows and fights him but is ultimately seduced by his goals of mutant prosperity and the allure of being her true self). If they do sequels, I can only hope that he's definitely involved. McAvoy was good, too, although I really hope he ditches the temple-touching next time around.
- Some of the FX were better than I'd expected (that chain sequence on the boat with Magneto was great), although some weren't great (Banshee flying, especially the first time, or Shaw's Shiva arms). Overall, though, they were generally better than not.
- Rebecca Romijn and Hugh Jackman - their cameos were fun.
- The film was not just mindless... it had something to say. I'm just not sure that what it had to say was all that great, or that how it said it had as much of an impact as I would have liked.
Thanks though man. Looking forward to seeing this on Saturday.
cant wait for a sequel !
