X-Men: The Last Stand
2006
Directed by Brett Ratner, written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn
Edited: A really, really, really long review in here. Warnings: Spoilerific and not at all complimentary.
In short, I was disappointed. I loved the
first two movies, both when I originally saw them in the theaters
(opening night for both) and when I've rewatched them since. I had some
quibbles, of course, but in general I really liked them - the overall
themes, the character interactions and arcs, most of the dialogue
(especially the first one). In the special features for X-2, Singer
tells the actors at one point that they're dealing with a very thin line
between very cool and very cheesy, and they always have to be aware of
that line and fall just on the right side of it. In almost every
instance of the first two, I think he/they succeeded with that - yes,
there are some places where you have to grin at yourself because you
know the shot was set up To Be Cool...but your heart sped up when it
happened nonetheless, and your grin has a tingle of adrenaline at the
corners. There were cliches, there were hokey moments, there were bad
lines, but for the most part they were sensitively done, with a delicacy of touch both in the details and in the bigger picture that made them memorable.
I felt that Last Stand
lacked that sensitivity. Too often, it fell on the other side of that
line, and many moments which could have been cool or breathtaking or
emotionally powerful just made me feel a little embarrassed on their
behalf.
The movie was well set up. We'd been preparing for
Jean's transformation into Phoenix from the first movie, and X-2 brought
that arc to the liminal point. We knew the characters, we knew about
mutant powers, we knew about the human/mutant interactions and
political/personal problems raised thereby. We had multiple characters,
plot threads, and thematic arcs, all ready and waiting to be exploited
into a fan-fucking-tastic movie. And, in my opinion, Last Stand kind of
dropped the ball.
We'd explored the character interactions
between (among others) Xavier and Magneto, Magneto and Mystique, Logan
and Rogue, Storm and Nightcrawler, Stryker and Magneto / Stryker and
Xavier, and of course the whole Jean-Scott-Logan triangle. Each of these,
along with the host of smaller ones, brought not only life and
personality into each character but also contributed to both the
personal character arcs and the larger thematic questions of the films.
Every character had a different perspective and reaction to the same
problems, and together they presented a rich and coherent tapestry.
We
saw some of that in Last Stand, but on the whole the characters felt
flatter, mouthing platitudes and saying what we expected them to say, or
- worse - what someone's conception of A Person On This Side would say. To wit:
Magneto felt merely malicious, rather than bitterly impassioned.
Storm was a cheerleader for the Good GuysTM
with a bad haircut. Bobby was pointless and never had anything to say
for himself, either about Rogue or about why the hell he was one of the
main characters to begin with. We left Pyro in X-2 as an angry
adolescent possessed of great power and little restraint, wanting to
flex his muscles - a hothead drunk on power. We found him again a
psycho utterly devoid of any human feeling or remorse, even for his
closest friends, just waiting for a chance to burn things. Where did
the angst go? I can't even remember the metal guy's name, although I
liked him in a passive kind of way. Hank/the Beast was good, and I
liked him, but he didn't quite capture my imagination. Kitty Pryde had
no character at all, period; I resented her on Rogue's behalf, but I
couldn't even work up much passion about that.
Where did Nightcrawler go? I'm not saying "he
should have been in this movie" because, while that would have been fun,
I understand that there are always outside factors. But, given how
central he was to the previous movie, it would have been nice to have a
line about "damn, we could really use Nightcrawler right now...too bad
he's incommunicado in that religious retreat in the Ural Mountains" or
something.
Jean was totally hot. Yes yes oh the hot.
Who found her that gown (I suspect Magneto - he is sartorially
inclined and has a distinct flair for the dramatic) and where can I get
one? But...did anyone else look at the Phoenix visuals and think dark
Willow?
(And did anyone else notice while Logan and Storm were
sobbing their poor widdle hearts out that the room was oddly spotless
for a scene of recent destruction and torn apart bodies? Not even a
fine sifting of ash. Xavier got disintegrated, not vacuumed.)
The
little mutant-suppressing boy (was that Jimmy/Leech? never clear on
that). He gets rescued. Great. Bloody inconvenient, but great and
warm and fuzzy. Then what? No one talks about him. Supposedly he was
at the school in one of the summing-up shots, which seems like a
likely ending...but how are they going to have a kid who suppresses
mutant powers in a school for learning to use mutant powers? Are
they going to banish him from all training sessions? After school
games? He is a mutant among mutants, and I can't imagine he's going to
be too popular.
Except with people like Rogue, whose power is more
curse than advantage. If she wants to boink
Bobby so badly, why doesn't she just stick little Jimmy in the bedroom
closet with a video game and a pair of headphones for a couple hours?
Hell, she could just "borrow" his powers for a little while and cancel
herself out...
And Jesus
Christ. If I were James Marsden, I would have thrown a bloody fit upon
reading the script. "I get five pages of self-indulgent, undisciplined,
over-the-top angst, having completely fallen apart. All my friends,
including my beloved mentor, totally give up on me and go on with
their lives. Then I get killed? Wham bam thank you ma'am hope you had a nice trip bye now? And I get mentioned maybe twice more through the whole fucking film? Nobody cares that I'm dead? What the hell?!"
I'm not even
going to go into the bad dialogue. So many painful lines.
Hammer-over-the-head obvious dialogue, from Hank's "Well, you get the
idea" to the voice-over "Come here to get your plastic guns" to Logan's
sappy "we're a big happy family and work as a team" thing at the end.
Some good lines, too - Mystique and Magneto each had a couple good ones,
Logan and Rogue's interactions (however brief) were pretty good, I have
to admit I liked Bobby's comeback to Pyro ("you should never have
left"), etc.
Mystique is so
fucking cool, just like in the previous ones...until she gets shot.
This is a two-part problem. In my opinion, Magneto would not have acted
like that. No, I'm not saying he would have gathered her to his chest
and cried and taken care of her and promised to love her always no
matter what. Of course not. He doesn't give a fuck about humans, and
even most mutants are simply useful to the greater cause, not valuable
in of themselves. If it had been another mutant, I could see his
reaction as is. But he and Mystique had a relationship. I'm not saying
they're were sleeping together (although I rather think they were - she was clearly infatuated with him); I'm saying it was
more than simple expediency that made her his right-hand, um, mutant.
He cared for her, I think, a little more than for most others, just as
below all the ideological differences and their bitter struggle he truly
cared for Xavier. There's no way he would have taken her with him or
accepted her as she is now, a human.
But. She was a
mutant. She worked with him for God knows how many years. She just, as
he recognizes, saved him. And he just walks out without any thing more
than that one acknowledgment. He abandons her, naked, on the floor of
the jail that he just freed her from. That felt wrong, and I don't
think it's purely my own sentimental desire to see him be kind.
The
second problem is then Mystique's reaction. Yes, she was abandoned and
betrayed - but she knows him as well as anyone else other than Xavier
does. Surely this doesn't come as a particular surprise, however
painful. One of her central traits is her clear and unwavering loyalty
to Magneto, a loyalty bordering on devotion. Something that powerful
doesn't vanish in a moment, and even snapped by his rejection, it would
not have, of all things, sent her to the people she hates most in all
the world. Hell hath no fury, perhaps, but Mystique would have gone to
the X-Men long before she went to the human government to betray Magneto
to his death. I'm sorry. It just doesn't ring true for me.
Then
the end, or lack thereof for her. So she's human (and oh God, that
hurts, because she is so wonderful and self-assured and alive, to see
her brought down like that is almost unbearable), and without family or
home or clan. We see her betray Magneto to the government, albeit
unsuccessfully. And she disappears. No word. No trace. She doesn't
show up at the school, she isn't in the final conflict, we don't even
see her hang herself quietly in some hotel bathroom. A character with
tremendous personality and a profound impact on the plot throughout
three movies just...goes away.
Xavier also threw me totally for a
loop. Here we have the man who is the signpost for control through
education and self-discipline, restraining ethical misuse of mutant
powers, and Not Messing Around With Other People. And we find out all
of a sudden that he - the one who was supposedly helping Jean realize
her potential - deliberately blocked her off from three-fifths of her
native power and gave her multiple personality disorder. Are we really
to believe that the Professor we know from the first two movies would
use his powers to split and cage a person's mind like that? No. No,
I'm sorry, I just don't see that.
Now if we'd gone into a little
farther into it - if he'd said, look, we tried to help her, it wasn't
working, she had Actual Character Reasons why she was going crazy and
out of control, so we did this as a temporary measure while she grew up
and learned some self-discipline; once established, it had unexpected
side effects like the MPD, and it proved harder for her to break down
the blocks again than I'd expected, but it was a gradual process and we
were trying to reintegrate her and I was doing all I could to help her
assert full conscious control over her entire self, we just hadn't
succeeded yet...
Or, alternately, they could have introduced this
sudden darker side of the Professor, the possibility that he really does
tinker with other people's minds on a more permanent basis when he
feels it's for the best. That could be really interesting. But they
never went anywhere with it. They just said "I did this thing, I
don't have to explain myself to you" and then wham, the issue got
dropped. Even after his death (which, btw, lends some credence to this
'darker side of Xavier' idea...if you stayed until after the credits),
the other characters could have explored the idea of his having done
this, the moral ramifications, the physical consequences. But no. Jean
warns Logan that Xavier has messed around with his mental wiring, too,
"tamed" him, and she screams at Xavier to stay out of her head, and
that's an end to it. I'm sorry, that's insufficient.
On
the other hand, the relationship between Magneto and Xavier, thank God,
was still excellent and consistent with the first two films. They
utterly opposed each other, they would fight to the end, they enraged
each other probably more than anyone else in the world, but they still
cared for each other. Some deep thread of their friendship still
existed. Xavier didn't visit Magneto in prison to try to convert him;
Magneto could have killed Xavier to at a dozen different times and only
tried once, when his death would also have meant the deaths of all
humans; he tried to hide the knowledge of the school and the X-Men from
Stryker. They were, beyond it all, old friends. One of the few moments
that rang true to me was when Pyro made some glib remark about the
Professor and Magneto turned on him in a cold fury. But I frankly think
that a large part of this is due to the excellence of the actors, and
their ability to project more than what is strictly written, rather than
to any care on the part of the writers.
I did
like the continuing Magneto-related chess imagery going throughout the
movies. It's not pervasive, but it keeps showing up, from Xavier and
Magneto playing chess in the plastic prison to Magneto referring to
people as pawns to his playing chess in the park at the end.
And I
loved the end shot of Magneto reaching out to the chess piece and seeing
it twitch, just a little...That was a single brilliant moment in an otherwise limp movie.
Angel/Warren was not hot, was corny as hell, and has one reason to
exist, period: to give Worthington a reason to look for a suppressant
for the mutant gene. End of story. At least the last
mutant-son-of-an-evil-father has a real plot presence. Angel makes
maybe four more appearances on screen, total, and his only other
contributions to the plot are to kickstart Storm into further cheesy
We're A Team declarations and to save his father from plummeting to his
death. He is absent for nearly all of the movie. Man, if you're going
to have a guy with wings, use him.
And then - Angel saves his
father. And disappears. Where does Mr. Worthington go? We see Angel
flying over the park at the end, but with no clues as to whether he's
gone back to the school...where his father is...how their relationship
stands...whether Worthington is still going to conduct anti-mutant
research (besides which, I wanted him to let the bastard fall. I mean,
what the hell. What kind of satisfaction is that?)...
The scene with him as a boy, hacking off his wings, sobbing with pain and fear and shame - God, that was painful. That
was true, emotionally true, and it struck home. If they'd had that
kind of raw psychological grit through the rest of the film, it would
have been so powerful.
And Jean. The silent center of the movie. I'm
not even sure where to start with her. For me, my problem with her is
not aesthetic (oh no not aesthetic), not a question of bad dialogue or
inconsistencies, so much. It's structural. She should have become
Phoenix at the end of X-2, not secretly been half Jean, half Phoenix
all along (phoenix = reborn, rising from ashes, remember? not just a
cool tag for a suppressed personality). And - well, not to sound hokey,
but what does she want? What does Phoenix want? To be free of
Xavier's blocks? That's already happened. Now what? What does she
desire, what does she remember, what does she feel, what sets her off,
how the hell is she connected to the plot of the mutant cure? Magneto
describes her as a great weapon for his side but never asks her to do
anything. She doesn't stop the cure from working, she doesn't kill the
boy, she doesn't save Magneto, she doesn't affect public opinion on
mutants, she doesn't even have the cure used on her. The themes embodied in her (her name
is Grey) are never fully addressed, never pulled to the breaking point
and then resolved, or even deliberately left hanging; they just get
abandoned. She seems virtually separate from the other half of the
plot. She barely even speaks. She floats through the movie, gorgeous
and coiled with power, watching. Watching. Occasionally losing her
temper and going psycho on everyone, but we're not always quite sure
why, and we don't know what snaps her out of it, we don't know if it's
possible to find Jean in there at all anymore. Why is Phoenix even like
this? "Power is crazy and corruptive" is simply not sufficient. If
she is drunk on power, she would be more active; if she is simply crazy,
then what does she feel or see that has broken her mind like that? She
is a powerful (emotionally, not just physically) character,
sympathetic, compelling, potentially complex. People swirl about her,
but she is the eye of the storm and does nothing, and the other half of
the storm rages on without her. She is fascinating, but rootless, and -
although I think she's fantastic - ultimately pointless.
---
In
short - the first movies were all about shades of grey. No one is
perfectly good (although some come damn close - but even they make
mistakes), no one is utterly evil. People have fear and hatred, people
do terrible things, but there are always points of view. Everyone has
reasons for what they do. We just happen to endorse some points of view
over others; we think that Xavier is the Good Guy and that Magneto and
Stryker and Senator Kelly are Not - but they are all Not in different
ways, and always, always for reasons. There is always more to them than a single viewpoint on this one issue.
Logan
embodies a lot of that: his isolation from other humans, his inability
to get along with other mutants, his "fuck 'em all" attitude, his
compassion for and connection to Rogue, his ability to see both Magneto
and Xavier's points of view, his disgust at the X-Men's seeming naivete,
his outrage at Magneto's callous will to murder. That is why Logan is the central character, not just his cocky attitude and his claws.
Last
Stand took a paint roller to those shades of grey. They weren't gone
entirely, but a lot of what remained felt like essential set up - the
prep work done before the movie was actually made, the lines put in
place by Singer and the previous writers. Magneto's equating humanity
with the Nazis/other perpetrators of genocides, Logan's "not working
with the team" at the beginning (although I'd say he was doing all
right), Xavier's questionable interference with Jean (as above), Rogue's
wanting the cure (which could have been used SO much better than it
was), and so forth.
But for the most part, everything was black and
white. All the Bad Mutants were pointlessly Evil (and, please note, not
only predominantly Goth but openly sexual and sexually ambiguous, with
overtones of S/M, all of which pisses me off to No End), all the Good
Guys worked together and were a big productive family. There's a kid
locked up in a sterile cell in a lab and no one seems to care. We
barely even see the human side of things, except for government bigwigs
and a couple guards. People are loyal, or they are traitors, or flip
from one to the other in the blink of an eye and are never heard from
again. Worthington is a class-A bastard with no redeeming qualities and
a cliched personality. And - just everything. On and on. The
ambiguity, the moral dilemmas, the questions, the problems, all get
simplified. The core issues are flattened into opposing teams. Half
the thematic or plot threads of the trilogy are never resolved.
Logan
felt watered down, without the wildfire that had given him power in the
first two. Jean was right when she told him he'd been tamed, and,
sadly, it again holds true for the rest of the film as well.
IMDB Link: X-Men III
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