Plot Threads If They'd Continued X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

A recent episode of Myopia Movies is about the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand. It's the third and last present-day X-Men movie of the early 2000s before the franchise was rebooted with the 1960s-set X-Men: First Class and its historical-fiction sequels. 

I was not a participant in the podcast but I did listen. Here are my thoughts:

*Much of the film revolves around how a "cure" for mutation was discovered. Rogue (Anna Paquin), whose life-draining mutant abilities have essentially ruined her life, ends up taking it in order to interact physically with her boyfriend Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) without risking hurting or killing him. However, the ending strongly hints the cure may only be temporary, with a theoretically de-powered Magneto shown able to slightly move a chess-piece. Nic seemed to think this made the whole film pointless, but this has some interesting implications.  

If a mutant who wishes to be "normal" has to undergo the procedure repeatedly, this means they're basically living with a chronic illness in terms of expenses. Who paid for Rogue to be "cured" the first time and who will be paying for it if she has to undergo the procedure every few weeks like, say, chemotherapy? Owing to Rogue's age, she was either in high school when her powers kicked in and she ran away from home (high school dropout) or had recently finished (that trip she and her boyfriend were planning in the first film could have been a graduation trip). With that level of education she's going to have a hard time finding a job that could pay for continuous treatment, and that could make her vulnerable to bribery.

(In the comics, Rogue was a originally a villain aligned with Mystique, so her doing increasingly desperate things for money--possibly including betraying the X-Men--because she is absolutely terrified of losing her normal life would make sense. And if she does something so bad Bobby breaks up with her, that emphasizes the tragedy of her situation.)

Also, nobody knows the cure isn't permanent. Imagine her life-draining powers coming back at the absolute worst possible time--say she's making out with or having sex with Bobby and he ends up in a coma like her boyfriend from the first film. Assuming he wakes up, her guilty feelings might lead her to push him away, he might break up with her out of fear, or she might refuse to leave his bedside until he revives and that takes her out of the game when she might well be needed.

*Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) transferred his consciousness into the body of a brain-dead man, who awakens at the end of the film. Xavier is in a new body, which potentially means a new actor who'll need to mimic Patrick Stewart's mannerisms and might "speak" telepathically with Stewart's voice, and for the first time in decades is able to walk. This is going to be a very big deal. Also complications--with Xavier legally dead, how is he going to get his money and the school back? There's no real legal precedent for "my body was destroyed but my consciousness is in a new body," so Xavier's enemies in the political realm could take advantage.

*Per politics, the film establishes there's a Department of Mutant Affairs, headed by Beast (Kelsey Grammar). Per one of the Wikis, apparently it is the successor to the villainous William Stryker's anti-mutant paramilitary force. Placing a mutant in charge of a government agency assigned to deal with mutant-related issues reminded me of how the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, previously corrupt as hell and prone to mistreating Native Americans, eventually became largely staffed by Indians.

*With Xavier apparently dead, Storm (Halle Berry) is now in charge of his school and presumably of the X-Men. How will she handle the new responsibilities? And she does have a bit of an attitude problem--something that annoyed me is how she lectured Rogue about how she doesn't need a cure. Storm is so powerful her people back in Africa worshipped her as a weather-controlling goddess (and if you count Age of Apocalypse as something that happened in the past, Apocalypse made her one of his Four Horsemen back in the 1980s), but Rogue literally cannot touch people without hurting or killing them. Storm is blessed beyond imagining, but Rogue's life sucks. Although Beast does tell her how flat-out stupid her attitude is, one wonders if the lesson will stick.

*Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who was forced to kill love interest Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) after she was totally possessed by an alternate personality called "Phoenix," is going to be a complete mess emotionally. If you've read the X-Men Origins: Wolverine comic, this is not the first time a pretty redhead he's in love with has died because of him. Combine this with my earlier Bobby/Rogue scenario and that's three X-Men who are "out of the game" so to speak.

*Mystique (Rebecca Romjin) had lost her powers and after being callously abandoned by Magneto (Ian McKellen), went over to the government and spilled everything she knew about the Brotherhood. Any members at large after their defeat at Alcatraz, assuming they figure this out, are going to want to KILL her. And without her shape-shifting abilities, she's more vulnerable. Assuming the cure is temporary she might well regain her powers, but until then the Brotherhood might think her an easy target. Key phrase--might think. After all, she's still a skilled martial artist, and I can imagine the overconfident Brotherhood finding that out the hard way. Unless she's in the best witness protection program possible, she might well be safer in prison.

(TVTropes claimed that Mystique was originally supposed to be with Magneto at the end, implying that his "abandonment" of her and her defection to the government were all an elaborate charade. But with the Brotherhood scattered, Magneto's devotees might not get the memo.)

*Magneto has been de-powered, but might be regaining his abilities. He's vulnerable now, and a hunted man. Mystique may well be coming after him--and if her powers return she's once again the perfect spy and assassin--so I can imagine him becoming super-paranoid. And Pyro (Aaron Stanford), if he escaped Alcatraz as well, might challenge the weakened Magneto for leadership of the Brotherhood much like Fabian Cortez attempted to overthrow Magneto in the comics.

*The mutant cure has been weaponized, much like Magneto feared. Having some kind of strike team with plastic guns carrying cure-darts makes sense for dealing with dangerous mutants, which in turn means there's less need for the X-Men. Per my above comment about Xavier and politics, the government might decide now is the time to deal with how he's basically got a private paramilitary force he staffs with the teachers and even students. And an anti-mutant military unit could be misused--"cure" mutants and then kill them.

*If the mutant cure is temporary, captured Brotherhood members jailed in ordinary prisons might suddenly start breaking out. Given how Pyro is the most developed of the villains, that might be a chance for him to return.

Seriously, there are a lot of threads that could have been followed in this one. Rather than the usual Status Quo is God, the filmmakers went total base-breaking with killing off Jean, Cyclops, and (temporarily) Xavier, de-powering (at least temporarily) Rogue, Mystique, and Magneto, making Beast a Cabinet official, and creating something alternatively a miracle or a dangerous anti-mutant weapon. A pity the movie didn't do as well as the others.

Movie Review: X-Men Apocalypse (2016)

Last night I saw X-Men Apocalypse with my Myopia Defend Your Childhood crew, the same night the podcast on the 2000 film premiered.

The Plot

In 3600 BC, the mutant En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) is undergoing a transfer of consciousness from one body to another. Unfortunately for him, there's a rebellion against the "false god" and he ends up entombed underneath a pyramid. Flash forward to the 1980s and he's awoken by a bunch of cultists and begins planning to take over the world. Instrumental to his plans are a new set of Four Horsemen, including one Eric Lensherr (Michael Fassbender). Opposing him are the earliest X-Men, led by Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and including his associate Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), wild card mutant freedom fighter Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), young telepath Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), who can shoot energy beams from his eyes.

The Good

*Owing to the time-travel plot of X-Men: Days of Future Past, this movie serves as a bridge linking the films set in the 1960s and 1970s to the present day. There's a lot of foreshadowing the events of the first X-Men film for Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and the third film for Jean Grey.

*Speaking of Jean, the insecurities she suffers in the first film are clear here as well, even though the movie takes place 20-odd years earlier.

*We meet Magneto's doomed wife and daughter and see the vengeance he unleashes for their deaths. It's a bit more subdued than the scene from the comics I remember--he turns the guns of the soldiers sent after him on their owners and we see see silhouettes of men shooting themselves in the head--but it works. Points for the Polish police in this film being clever--they come after Magneto with bows and arrows and aren't wearing their badges because there's metal in them.

*And speaking of Magneto's family, Quicksilver (Evan Peters) has two really awesome scenes and a couple of really funny lines.

*The movie is set in the 1980s (I'm guessing the spring or summer of 1983, considering that Return of the Jedi is in theaters and the viral TV ad explicitly says "1983") and they capture much of the feel of the period, including the clothes, the media people consume, etc. This is pretty nice, although the fact they tried to make it historically accurate in that area makes the historical inaccuracies I'll get to a lot more damning.

*For those of feminist inclinations, there's a conversation between Mystique and the young Jean Grey about the 1960s X-Men of X-Men: First Class that probably passes the Bechdel test. Also, given how Mystique is probably around Xavier's age and Jean Grey would have been in her teens, it's a bit of intergenerational female bonding. :)

*We meet Colonel Stryker (Josh Helman) and we see him at a midpoint in his character evolution. He's still quite willing to exploit mutants for military purposes like in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Days of Future Past, but his behavior toward the youngest of Xavier's students shows he hasn't turned into the monster of the second film who refers to a child mutant as a "creature" and schemes to kill all mutants everywhere.

*There's a really funny dig at X-Men: The Last Stand and possibly a bit of self-referential mockery of this movie when the teenage X-Men go see Return of the Jedi at the local mall.

*The movie introduces Nightcrawler, who is a lot younger than his character in the second film but still has the fast-talking tendencies and strong religious faith. I liked that.

The Bad

*Where to begin? For starters, about a quarter of the movie could have been cut if they eliminated the Stryker/Weapon X subplot that's solely an excuse to include Wolverine. Much of the movie is dull, and considering how fast-paced and entertaining I found the first one, that's actually kind of sad.

*Other than Magneto, the Four Horsemen aren't really that developed. Angel and Psylocke are particularly weak in that department. Storm is a bit better, but not as good as Magneto.

*Xavier at one point is depicted as being able to contact everyone one Earth telepathically. That contradicts the first movie and the second movie too, both of which show him needing Cerebro to amplify his powers to that extent. If Xavier was naturally that powerful, the whole "evil Cerebro" plot of the second film wouldn't need to happen at all. Not only is he overpowered in one scene, he's also underpowered at a critical point--he somehow loses the ability to take control of enemies lacking mental shields like Magneto's, which he demonstrated in the first film. That could have come in really handy in that one scene.

*Speaking of being overpowered, the fact depicts Magneto being able to cause magnetic events on the other side of the planet. Even with...some assistance...that's ridiculous.

*They bring in Jubilee, but do very little with her. It wouldn't have been that difficult to have her join the adventure along with Cyclops, Jean, and the newly-introduced Nightcrawler that I won't go into for reasons of spoilers (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

*There's a scene where Apocalypse uses Xavier's telepathy to go after the world's nuclear arsenals. That would explain why this "god" doesn't get wiped from the planet immediately upon revealing himself, but given how many weapons are in storage or aboard aircraft (which he completely overlooked), that issue would be remedied in hours if not minutes. He'd still get nuked.

*Apocalypse claims to be the inspiration of behind Elohim (Judaism), Krishna (Hinduism), Ra (the Egyptian religion), and many other faiths. However, he's depicted as being trapped under a collapsed pyramid in 3600 BC. This Jewish site states that Moses lived 1393-1273 BC, while this site states Abraham would have been born in 1800 BC. He's much too early to be the "historical God of Abraham." And this site here depicts the earliest Vedic (proto-Hindu) faiths to be in the second millennium BC. Apocalypse can't be Krishna either. Moira McTaggart theorizes Apocalypse could have inspired the Four Horsemen of Revelation, but that could be her own ignorance talking--Revelation was written in the late 1st Century AD.

*Apocalypse in ancient Egypt is depicted as having all this super-tech, which in the comics is explained but in the movie it's not. That's a problem.

*The teen pickpocket Storm is threatened with having her hand cut off by Egyptian shopkeepers. Yes, losing one's hand is/was a common punishment for theft in the Islamic world, but this is Egypt in the 1980s. It was ruled by an aggressively secularist military regime that I doubt would tolerate that. This page here even cites the Egyptian penal code to show that this would not have been the case. Stereotyping much?

The Verdict

A bunch of missed opportunities, too much New Powers as the Plot Demands, and far too long. 5.0 out of 10. I'm seriously tempted to write a "how I would have done it" page.

Blast From The Past Movie Review: X-Men (2000)

The other night for Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we watched the 2000 film X-Men, which re-ignited public desire for comic-book films after Batman and Robin temporarily killed the genre. I owned a VHS copy of the movie when I was in high school, so this was definitely something I wanted to participate in. Here's the podcast. And onto the review...

The Plot

In "the near future," U.S. Senator Robert Kelly (depicted as a Kansas Republican, which is no surprise given Hollywood politics) wants to register the growing numbers of mutants, citing how potentially dangerous they could be. This does not sit well with Eric Lensherr (Ian McKellan), a Holocaust survivor whose "mutant power" is controlling metal. His old friend Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who runs a school for young mutants to teach them to use their powers responsibly, must stop him from using a young mutant Rogue (Anna Paquin) in a terrorist plot with the help of mysterious loner Logan (Hugh Jackman), whose cage-fighting name is Wolverine...

The Good

*The movie does a good job depicting the villains sympathetically. The film opens with the young Magneto separated from his family in a concentration camp, with the implication he's being kept alive for forced labor while his parents are sent to the gas chambers. Given his history, it would be very difficult for him to not view the proposed Mutant Registration Act as another set of Nuremberg Laws. Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), in a conversation with Senator Kelly, tells him it was men like him that made her afraid to go to school as a child. If her shape-shifting abilities didn't kick in until she was older and she was born with blue skin and those yellow demon-eyes, well, that's not really a surprise. :(

*I watched Hellboy earlier that afternoon for another podcast and X-Men's quick pace and near-complete lack of "let's check the time" moments was a great contrast. The movie is rarely if ever boring and moves along at a nice clip.

*The film's got a holy trinity of Jackman, Stewart, and McKellan in terms of good actors. Paquin, despite being born in Canada and growing up in New Zealand, does a good job playing the Mississippi-born Rogue. Paquin plays Louisiana's Sookie Stackhouse in the True Blood series, so it seems she was always able to do a good job playing Southern women.

*There's a fair amount of character growth in the film. Wolverine grows out of being a loner "living from day to day" and sustaining himself by cage-fighting, while some incidents that happen at the end of the film show that the X-Men, though they'd never become terrorists or hate normal people, might be a bit more tolerant of Magneto's militancy than they were before. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) learns to overcome her self-doubt about her abilities when an injury to Xavier forces her to use the telepathy-amplifying Cerebro. Even Senator Kelly, although he doesn't do the "mutants are human beings" Heel-Face Turn of the animated series I watched as a child, does show signs of overcoming his prejudice.

*Magneto calls his organization "The Brotherhood of Mutants," in contrast to the original comic's "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants." Nobody ever thinks they're evil--in his mind he's trying to protect mutants from another Holocaust by any and all means, and his plan in the film isn't especially evil by the standards of comic-book villain schemes. No details though--that would be spoilers.

*Wolverine's past is shown, not just told, when he wakes up in a strange medical facility and immediately lashes out at the first person he encounters. He doesn't just say that he remembers weird and painful medical experiments.

*Although Senator Kelly is clearly a villain (in a private conversation later he said if it was up to him mutants would be locked away and people like him are needed for the "war," that according to Grey consists of mutants getting picked on), he's not a one-dimensional straw-man. When discussing the Mutant Registration Act with Grey before the Senate, he raises the national-security implications of super-powered individuals--he cites how Kitty Pryde could easily walk into a bank or the White House. And she's fairly low on the mutant food chain--Magneto could take on an entire army by himself, while Xavier could park himself outside the White House and mind-control the president into launching a nuclear strike. If I lived in this world I'd oppose the Mutant Registration Act on the same grounds as Magneto, but there's a lot more gray here than with the Nuremberg Laws.

*There's some good snarky lines, like Magneto's response when Cyclops orders Storm (Haile Berry) to unleash lightning on him or Storm's Pre-Asskicking One-Liner to Toad. Most of my fellow podcasts thought that was a groaner, but I liked it. :) However, the best line of them all is the "yellow spandex" riff on the goofy comic-book costumes of the heroes.

*The special effects have really held up well. I don't recall a single instance of obvious CGI, obvious puppets, etc.

*Kelly's villainy is depicted in pretty subtle ways too--he keeps referring to Jean Grey as "Miss" instead of "Doctor" and this list of mutants he has in his hand are an obvious tie in with Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have a list of 200 Communist spies in his hand.

*Wolverine's old injuries appearing when his healing factor is momentarily shorted out is a good science gag. One symptom of scurvy is that old wounds re-open, so even if cuts, bruises, etc. go away, to some degree they're still there. Given how scientifically implausible many X-men powers are (someone online pointed out that to generate laser blasts from his eyes, Cyclops would have to drink gasoline), that was actually pretty cool.

The Bad

*The minor villain Toad has a bit of New Powers As The Plot Demands thing going. Throughout the movie he's depicted as having a lengthy tongue he can use as a weapon as well as preternatural jumping ability, but in battle with Jean Grey, he somehow manifests the ability to spew gunk that clings to her face and threatens to suffocate her. It would've been better if he'd used his giant tongue as a weapon in that particular scene.

*Sabertooth's lengthy history with Wolverine, which is later revealed in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, is never even hinted at. Although the movie depicts the reasons Wolverine lost his memory, there's no indication that Sabertooth ended in the same position. It would have been nice if Sabertooth kept dropping hints or even tried to sway Wolverine to his side, with Wolverine having absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

*There's a deleted scene where Storm is teaching students at Xavier's school about the conversion of Constantine that could have been left in the film, perhaps when Wolverine wakes up in Xavier's mansion and is wandering around. It'd be a nice bit of foreshadowing for the final confrontation.

The Verdict

*I'm not going to go out of my way to buy a new copy of the film, but it's pretty good. 8.0 out of 10.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS and X-MEN: APOCALYPSE Trailers

Over the last couple days, I've gotten a couple really nice cinematic bones thrown my way. The trailers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and X-Men: Apocalypse have just been unleashed.

If the Turtles are giving interviews to the media (the whole "we're brothers who hate bullies" thing), I'm guessing the masquerade has been broken. Of course, when it looks like there's a straight-up alien invasion happening in New York, I think people would be a lot more tolerant of "freaks" than they would be before.

And enter Casey Jones. Pretty impressive--able to take down a bunch of Foot guys in seconds and even evade a gigantic mutant. If the movie is anything like canon he and April are going to hook up. I imagine her cameraman and Michelangelo are going to be so disappointed. :)

I also like what they did with the Foot this time around. They basically seem to operate like a Special Forces battalion and even dress the part in the scene where Casey rescues April from a bunch of them. They still kept the Shredder Japanese, although with recasting he's now a skinnier guy with a goatee. Did the mutagen we see him keeping at the end of the first film make that happen? It could be a nice in-universe explanation.

My one quibble is it looks like in the trailer April is taking off her clothes in public for no reason. Given how this movie is being produced by Michael Bay (albeit directed by somebody else I think), I suspect there's his typical silly Fanservice going on. And I say this as a Megan Fox fan.

I enjoyed the first one, much to some of my friends' horror. Hopefully this new one will be fun.

I admit Apocalypse was not one of my favorite villains back when I was an elementary schooler reading the X-Men comics and watching the X-Men animated series. However, this trailer succeeds in making him really cool.

And Jennifer Lawrence is back as Mystique. I liked her better than Rebecca Romjin, who played her in the X-Men films that came out when I was in high school. She's a great actress generally, plus Mystique in X-Men First Class and Days of Future Past is a much more complicated character. And in her speech to Cyclops, we have her going full-blown Katniss Everdeen, which is always cool. We also have Sophie Turner, best known for Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, as the young Jean Grey. Interesting...

Hmm...Magneto as one of Apocalypse's Four Horsemen? Never seen that before. Given how in Days of Future Past we see an elderly Magneto lamenting how stupid he'd been as a young supervillain perhaps it's his alliance with (or subservience to) Apocalypse that's his wakeup call.

And it looks like they're bridging the gap between the 1960s/1970s First Class era and the 2000 films both chronologically (this is the 1980s) and thematically (Xavier losing his hair).

I wonder if they'll bring in, or at least hint at, Mr. Sinister? I remember reading in the Age of Apocalypse comics--in Mr. Sinister's death scene specifically--that he'd made a Faustian bargain with Apocalypse to gain immortality and the freedom to pursue his scientific research.