KenK
Avenger
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2004
- Messages
- 10,655
- Reaction score
- 1
- Points
- 31
I don't agree here. The theme was stamped all over the movie. And the movie does have a theme, unlike the first two X-movies.
I can understand the disappointments; I share them too but I dealt with them as soon as I knew about the changes in creative team. It's less than intelligent to be surprised by the content of the movie, given the fact that online fans on here knew the details more than anyone else did.
The number of characters is not really an issue in a movie about a final showdown. Cameo roles were bound to happen. What hurt the movie was editing/runtime.
But the theme was transparently obvious. Xavier and Magneto talk of 'power corrupts', Xavier tells Wolveirne of his terrible choice regarding Jean, Storm argues with Wolverine over making a choice. Beast argues with the president over the cure weaponisation choice. You'd have to be pretty dense not to have noticed a theme that was mentioned throughout the movie.
I'm not saying that I didn't notice there being a theme. The issue is that the film as a whole was not well-made!! There was an under-developed feeling to everything that was done in the film to the point that whatever themes are being presented are irrelevant. I'm not going to excuse bad filmmaking just because a movie has a clear theme. Bearing that in mind, I can't totally blame Ratner, or the screenwriters, because the "choice" was always in Fox's hands. The choice was theirs to either secure Singer & Co. as soon as X2 made 85 million its first weekend, and immediately start development on the third film, will all the time in the world to do everything they would need long before May of last year, or let me do it after Superman Returns, as he always said he'd gladly come back. The only thing that would have kept X3 from coming out in 2005 would have been Fantastic Four, another Fox production of a Marvel comic, in which case that's just even more time for Singer to make the best movie possible, instead of a film where the script was allegedly written in a week, pre-production went along without a director, and when they finally do get a director, it's two months before shooting starts, then he quits, and Ratner comes on with little more than a month to prepare! And it shows. Scenes just jump from one to the next with no real transition, some effects weren't conceptualized very well (especially Colossus), and far too many characters are there just to be there. Aside from Callisto and Psylocke being little to nothing like their characters, they're not even referred to by name anyway! Not to mention other characters who don't even speak!! Which would be forgiveable if they had been involved in any halfway decent action/fight sequences! Deathstrike may not have had any lines in X2, but her fight with Wolverine was fantastic. We don't get any of that with X3.
I'm not saying the film didn't have its moments, but most of those moments don't particularly relate back to the story, or add to the story. It's basically a lot of various comic nuances like Beast reading while hanging upside down, Bobby turning himself into ice, etc. It's cool to see stuff like that, but I'd much prefer to see more character/story-driven moments that are well-executed.
A scene was very much looking forward to from the trailers and commercials was X-Men suiting up to go to Alcatraz, and Bobby, Kitty, and Peter volunteered to join them, with Wolverine initially rejecting them, because he knows how dangerous it'll be. Instead we get Wolverin monologuing and persuading them to join. Even from a casual filmgoer's standpoint, that's not something the film Wolverine would do. The films always established Logan as someone who'd try to keep the kids out of harm's way. Even in the context of this one film, it began with them in a training session and him making it abundantly clear that they're not ready to handle a combat situation. But by the end of the film, he's persuading them to go into battle with mutants that could, and have, easily whooped his ass?!? To say nothing of the fact that between the beginning of the film, and the climax, he has ZERO interaction with the students, except for Rogue, and no scenes are presented to develop on the idea of the students training to be X-Men.
Any focus on the students during the course of the film aims for frivolous high school melodrama, and it even fails on that level. Rogue's jealousy of Bobby and Kitty's friendship is completely unfounded, and Peter, he's given three words of dialogue in a gag scene. At least X2 had a minor acknowledgment of the fact that in the comics, Peter likes to draw. And it worked far better at evoking humor than in X3 with him walking down the hall with a giant TV in his arms (and doesn't his superhuman strength only apply when he's in metal form, anyway?).
And on a more shallow note. . . . .Anna Paquin looked too damn good in that X-uniform to only wear it once throughout the whole film!! Instead with get Storm without the high heels, and Kitty who's built like a twelve-year-old boy!
