13 Responses to Grey Area

  1. Evilsceptic June 4, 2011 at 11:34 am #

    I don’t It’s not supposed to be. As far as I understandthey are rebooting the entire marvel universe so the first three x-men movies are no longer official “movie canon”.

    I would be interested to know if the wolverine movie made the cut though

    • Roderick June 4, 2011 at 1:13 pm #

      But the movie in general didn’t seem like a reboot. The opening scene with young Erik is almost shot-for-shot identical with the opening of the first movie. Mystique’s appearance is identical. The designs of Erik’s helmet and of Xavier’s wheelchair are identical. Two actors from the original movies have cameos playing the same characters.

      And the ads for the film are certainly tying it to the original series, both in the layout of the posters and in the references to Stewart and McKellen in the commercials.

  2. Brandon June 4, 2011 at 11:38 am #

    X3 is best forgotten at this point.

  3. MikeP June 4, 2011 at 1:59 pm #

    Yeah, I don’t think this is a reboot as such. But the filmmakes are ignoring X-Men 3 just like Bryan Singer ignored all the Superman films after the second one in Superman Returns.

    • Roderick June 4, 2011 at 2:40 pm #

      A bit harder to do, though, since X3 is a direct continuation of storylines from X2.

  4. Evilsceptic June 5, 2011 at 6:34 am #

    The wiki article says it’s “a reboot to the other films in the franchise, creating a new timeline using the same characters”

    Would have been nice and they put the work into making everything “fit” rather than throw it all out the window.

  5. Gary Chartier June 5, 2011 at 9:37 am #

    A reboot, here or elsewhere, is evidence of intellectual laziness and lack of concern for fans.

  6. dennis June 5, 2011 at 1:29 pm #

    I don’t agree. While there certainly was much worth salvaging from the first two movies, the third was pretty awful, Making something good that fits in with something bad is probably not worth it.

    • Roderick June 5, 2011 at 3:03 pm #

      What was so awful about the 3rd movie?

      • Brandon June 6, 2011 at 12:50 am #

        OK, here we go.

        X2 is an excellent flick, which is based on Star Trek 2, a movie much-loved by Bryan Singer and his generation. Singer and John Ottman in their interviews and commentaries for X1 and X2 talk relentlessly about ST2. There are many obvious parallels between ST2 and X2. Sacrifice of Spock/Sacrifice of Jean…Genesis Device as the macguffin/Jason as the macguffin…Stryker’s white whale is Charles Xavier/Khan’s white whale is Kirk… et al. Even the pre-credit sequence at the end. In ST2 Spock speaks the familiar “Space, the final frontier…” lines, while in X2 Jean speaks the Xavier lines about mutation from the beginnings of X1 and X2.

        Anyway, while X2 is excellent it doesn’t equal ST2 (what movie does? at this point I think ST2 is one of the best movies ever made). Part of the problem is Stryker isn’t willing to kill himself to get revenge on Xavier, and Jean’s actions outside the Blackbird could have been accomplished inside the ship as well — in other words, she didn’t actually need to die. Part of the greatness of ST2 is that there really is no way out of Khan’s trap without someone going into the radiation room and fixing the ship, and no one on board can survive the conditions as well as Spock, so he drew the short straw. The only problem with ST2 is…ST3. They had to bring Spock’s arse back through some sort of “katra” nonsense.

        So now we get to X3. What did they do? They brought Jean back to life again. Again. How many times has Jean Grey been brought back to life now? John Byrne said, accurately, that the only problem with the Dark Phoenix saga is that it was ruined when they brought her back (through the exhausted old standby — it was a clone! a clone I tells ya!). What meaning do Jean’s many sacrifices have if she is immediately resurrected? And to draw the parallel with ST2, what meaning does that movie have, with Kirk having to finally face a no-win scenario and death, when it’s all undone in the next movie? Well, I guess it wasn’t a no-win scenario after all. So they brought Jean back and then wasted her again. Is she finally going to stay dead or are they going to phoney up another sequel and…wait, they already did that. Death and Jean Grey are like oil and water.

        There are many other problems with X3. One of the main cast members would only agree to return if she could have a central role, to the exclusion of other central characters. I won’t say her name but it rhymes with…screw it, its Halle Berry. So therefore the two characters ahead of Storm in the pecking order, Xavier and Scott Summers, were swiftly killed off, to make more room onscreen for Storm.

        Magneto’s powers increased with each flick, which is lazy and stupid. But even if I believed he could uproot and re-route the Golden Gate bridge so it ends at Alcatraz, I’m not sure that is the most efficient way of getting a dozen people to that island. There’s a new invention I’ve heard of called a “boat” which can safely travel across the water carrying passengers! I guess Magneto is one heck of an overachiever. He doesn’t do anything small when a lot of wasted effort will do. Reminds me of Krusty lighting a cigar with a thousand dollar bill. A cynic might say that the bridge sequence was a transparent attempt to insert an impressive but brainless CGI reel. Then there’s the fact that during the sequence it goes from daylight to darkness in one single cut (at 1:16:49 NTSC). The Earth’s rotation is a bit screwed up in the movie, just like in John Wayne’s flick “The Green Berets”, at the end, in which the sun sets in the east. The bridge also appears to be suspended in the air the whole time — what keeps it from falling into San Francisco Bay? Is the movie saying Magneto is holding the bridge in the air that whole time, even after he loses his powers? He’s got Yoda blown all to hell in the lifting heavy objects department, I’ll tell you that. I guess Magneto didn’t need Asteroid M to be in orbit, he could have just held it in place menacingly above any major city he wanted indefinitely?

        Scott Summers wasn’t much of a leader if he couldn’t handle one of Jean’s many sojourns into the bourn from which no traveler except Jean Grey returns. But the movie needed to get him out of the way to make room for Berry’s screen time, so that’s understandable. But that’s not the Scott Summers I know (yeah, that’s not a valid criticism, but nuts to that).

        New characters were introduced to use in CGI sequences, not because they meant anything to the plot. Why include Beast, Kitty, Juggernaut, Angel et al. and exclude all of the hundreds of others I can think of? I mean Dazzler and Longshot could have been used, with minor alterations to the CGI here and there. Why bother adding a scene with Moira MacTaggert, other than to show fanboys a scene with her in it? The flick is short but it could have been a lot shorter. Reminds me of what Pauline Kael wrote about “Heaven’s Gate” — admittedly, a much worse flick than X3. She wrote ‘watching the 3-hour Heaven’s Gate, I thought I knew exactly what should be cut, but when it was over, I wasn’t sure what should stay’.

        Then there’s Charles Xavier’s extremely unethical behaviour towards Jean Grey. In the comic, Xavier tries to help Jean understand and exert control over her great powers, but Jean is psychologically manipulated to the dark side of the force by a member of the Hellfire Club. In X3, Jean is psychologically manipulated to the dark side of the force by Xavier’s own blundering efforts to rob her of her powers. That is not the Xavier I know.

        And as long as they’re trashing major characters, they decided to include Rogue in the party. What a disastrous decision to have her get the “cure”. What did the lgbt folks, including Ian McKellen, who identify so strongly with the mutants in these flicks, think about that scene? I wasn’t even expecting it. It blindsided me. I expected to see Rogue appear on television saying “I don’t need the cure because I am not sick, so eff you all”. Then, the flick tosses in one of its many self-conscious dialogue scenes, in which Rogue offers the following explanation: “It’s what I wanted”. Well, I’m convinced. So the movie lacks the ability to justify Rogue’s decision, and does not even try.

        In sum, other than the fact that the movie is nothing more than a typical big-budget franchise sequel, with self-conscious nonsensical exposition dialogue scenes separating 4 or 5 major illogical special effect sequences, and other than the fact that they trashed most of what we knew about the characters up to that point — other than those things, I hated it.
        BTW, I am 100% sure that, in the rebooted series, Jean Grey will once more find herself killed, and Death will once more find her to be sour milk.

  7. dennis June 5, 2011 at 3:16 pm #

    It kind of went off of the rails with Professor X dying. Awful might not have been the best choice of words, I just remember not liking it as much as the first two. Granted the X men movies were better than the Spiderman films (Sam Rami (sp?) is good at what he does but was not the best choice for a superhero film franchise, especially now that the genre has been elevated by the Batman films and the unfortunately maligned Watchmen movie.) I retract my declaration that the third movie was awful, mea culpa.

    • Roderick June 6, 2011 at 2:36 am #

      It kind of went off of the rails with Professor X dying

      But he didn’t die. Remember the ending.

  8. dennis June 6, 2011 at 3:08 pm #

    Touche’ Professor Long, touche’

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