{ X:3 The Last Stand. }

[delga]

I have many, many issues with X-Men: The Last Stand and not all of them stem from my (small) knowledge of comic canon. A lot of them stem from the gratuitous nature of the deaths, the ending, and the fact that the film didn't make sense in its own medium, let alone in its wider canon.

Firstly, the story tried to do too many things at once. The Phoenix story was too much of an add-on. It's purpose seemed to be to have as many deaths as possible. There was no exploration into Jean's battle against herself. Comic-canonically speaking (and in terms of the earlier animated television series - i.e., not X-Men Evolution) that's what made the story interesting. It was Jean becoming this terrifying entity that she couldn't control. It was Jean and Phoenix that the X-men were fighting, and that's why the story was so tragic. In the movie, this becomes another way to make Logan/Wolverine a tragic hero. The story in the film should have either been the problem of dealing with Jean as Phoenix without the aid of the two people who knew her best (i.e. Scott and Xavier) or the story about what it meant to be a mutant. If you look at the film as being divided from the comic's history, it almost works, except again, Jean's story is sort of superfluous. She facilitates the emotional aspects of the film, by which I mean to say she kills everyone and then is killed. LIKE THE END OF THE SECOND MOVIE. So the film producers got two deaths from Famke. Fabulous. (In terms of the film as a single entity, her death makes perfect sense because there's nowhere else for her to go in terms of plot progression. If it was a TV series, she could recover and angst over everything she did and work through it, but it's a film and there is no resolution for her beyond death because anything else would feel cheap. Also, last film in the trilogy so whatever. I think I would have liked the whole story a hell of a lot more if we got to see that raging internal battle. Instead, all we got was echo-y voices and those shots of her looking at the battlefield catatonically.

As for Magneto, I think he was played off fairly well until that moment where he's all, "What have I done, ohnoes?!" Up until that point, he is the most consistent character. Over the course of the three films, his character has been built up very carefully - the direct opposition to the 'pure' humans, mutants above all, and that complex friendship that he has with Xavier. I think his rebuttal of Mystique made sense and her giving him up was a really, really shorthand explanation of Mystique's intense attachment to Magneto. The rebuttal must have stung her very, very much because she's always had this connection to Magneto. She has always been his right hand and now she's discarded. I can see why that connection was made so short but in an ideal world, it would have been discussed further. However, Magneto's moment of terrified reform, what? This also links back to Jean/Phoenix. Everyone says she's awful and terrible and terrifying, but, what? I just - there was no sense of her being a threat because she was so dormant unless provoked. Phoenix never seemed real to me until that huge battle scene when she flips out. That should have been the last in a sequence of scenes that showed that Jean could not fight Phoenix. Magneto's epiphany is weird because on the one hand, he's stripped of the one thing that he defines himself by, in which case I would have thought Jean would represent the success of his plan. But I guess her power is so astounding that it knocked him off his feet. I don't know. It wasn't convincing to me. And that last bloody scene - so was the 'cure' faulty, or WHAT?

Vinnie Jones as the Juggernaut? FTW. Seriously. But wasn't the Juggernaut, like, Charles Xavier's brother or half-brother? And he wore that helmet to stop mutants from reading his mind? Gah.

This film was also supposed to be about Storm and Wolverine stepping up, right? So why did that feel so cheap? That might be a personal issue more than an actual problem with the film.

Rogue GAVE UP HER POWERS? The whole point of the character is that tragic offset between what she is and what she wants. Not just that, but this plotline is a COMPLETE REVERSAL of the first two films! To one extent, Rogue is very much the one who wanted the distance from her powers; to the other, there's a lot of pride, eventually, in her status as a mutant and as one of the X-men.

I guess ultimately my problem with the film is that I didn't quite understand what it was trying to sell. This was the last battle? This was Jean's story? This was a story about loss? About accepting who you are? (I think you can just about make that last one fit, but it gets confused and hidden, especially with Rogue's story.) This was a story about dealing with...what? There's too much going on for the narrative to be coherent. It doesn't even make an entertaining movie when you look at it purely as part of the machine that is Hollywood because there is so much that you need to know from the first two films and the story goes back on a lot of that, too. The humour is all bunched up in the fight climax - most of the film is melancholy. The action is gratuitous and I also think it confuses the message. Why does Jean overreact so massively? How does she respond to Xavier's final words? How do we know the X-Men improve between that simulation at the beginning and the final battle (there's no continuation or development of control AT ALL)? If Magneto wanted mutants to be themselves, why not just take the boy - why the need to kill him? Why did Jean/Phoenix kill Scott? So many questions.

So I was disappointed. The first film was quite good, and whilst the second film didn't measure up, it wasn't a bad watch. You could watch it as a stand-alone. But I just don't think the third movie makes a lot of sense, and I don't know what its aims were. I certinly don't think it met any of them, unless the point was to be pointless which is all very indie and avante garde, but hardly appropriate when you consider who the film is marketed at. Just - I'm very disappointed.

Comments

[denorios.livejournal.com]

I agree with every single point. The Phoenix story was big enough to be the entire point of the movie, and yet it was almost completely marginalised. Rogue's story...oh man, don't even get me started! And yes, Magneto's 'what have i done?' just didn't ring true AT ALL bearing in mind he'd already seen Jean completely destroy Xavier without a shred of remorse. Wolverine just emo-ed through most of the film; they killed Scott for no reason at all; it was supposed to be the last film yet they gave us that Xavier teaser...GAH, IT WAS ALL AWFUL! RAGE!

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

didn't ring true AT ALL bearing in mind he'd already seen Jean completely destroy Xavier without a shred of remorse
That's it! I was trying to figure out why that comment felt so offhand and I as going to put it down to the delivery of the line but no I know what it was. If they were trying to put forward the idea that Magneto had no idea of Jean's power up until that point, it didn't work entirely because he watched her kill Charles. Even he protests in that scene at her house where she starts to face-off against the prof. (That was bugging me, thanks!)

I think the film could have worked as just a film if they hadn't tried to cram so much into it. It would have taken a lot of work to make it into a good film for X-Men fans anyway, but to just make it an okay film to chill out to? They needed to pick a story and stick to it. There was just too much that they were trying to do. And considering it was supposed to be the 'final stand', it just felt like another run-of-the-mill stop-Magneto race. Again. Isn't that story just old? None of the films ever accurately got into the X-Men story, I think because it's so difficult to condense the comics. But if you're going to make an issue out of genetics and hereditary, there needs to be an escalation of events from one part of the story to the next. Why? Because that's how effective linear narrative works.



lolz. I should go and watch Supernatural.

[denorios.livejournal.com]

Precisely. Why would he suddenly be shocked that Jean would kill hundreds of people who mean nothing to her when she's already destroyed the two people who meant the most to her, Scott and Xavier. Surely in killing her husband and her mentor/father-figure she's already shown what she was capable of? So why is he all 'oh no!' Just poor writing, IMO.

And yes, considering the end of the second movie was hinting at the Phoenix storyline, that should have been the plot of the third. Not the cure, not Magneto's crusade - it should have been about Jean and her struggle with herself/Phoenix. As it was, she just felt like a McGuffin, a way of adding 'emotion' to the movie by killing off characters for no reason.

And as for Rogue's storyline, what was the point of that? It just completely screwed with her character, got rid of all the growth and maturity she'd attained, by making her an emotional teenage girl who'd throw away everything that made her who she is just to be able to snog Bobby. Argh, that made me so mad. More than anything else in the movie, they completely fucked Rogue over.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Magneto's crusade felt like same old, same old. We get it! Mutants > humans. OK! The way to prove that? Tell a different story already. The big human ethics story is done with. It would have made perfect sense to lead to the Jean story which - as you rightly pointed out - was neatly started up at the end of X2. It was one of the good things about X2, the way they built up Jean's internal battle. She could feel too much power inside herself. That was the launch for the X3.

Thinking it about it that way, X3 reeks of studio interference, doesn't it? As though they didn't like the internal story, like they thought it was too small? Less is more, people!

Rogue's storyline - I can't even be properly coherent about it. What on earth was the point of the first two films if they were going to magic-reset it all? The entire concept of Rogue as a character - from the comics to both cartoon series through the first two films - was her growth as a character, her having overcome her self-alienation. Even if they were going to have her consider the 'cure', it was the wrong place to bring that up because by the end of X2, she's made her peace! I know in the comics it's always a big deal for her, not being able to touch Gambit but HELLO. No Gambit in the movie and other than the basics, there is practically NO consideration of the comics in the film so that obviously was not the impetus there. I can't even think why they made her go through that decision.

Also: Angel-whatshisface turned out to be useless and a completely superfluous plot. If they were going for a "some of the mutants chose the 'cure' for good reason and they shouldn't be judged for it", he could have been used. Instead, he embraced his inner nature and ROGUE of all people DISCARDED hers. (Logically it makes sense that Rogue has the greatest issues with her powers because they physically alienate her, but the decision is completely ILLOGICAL in the context of the films. Shoddy storyboarding.)

Overall, it felt like they'd got a lot of overblown action sequences, went for the emotional pull with gratuitous death and tried to string it together with something that I refuse to acknowledge as plot.

[denorios.livejournal.com]

Yes, Angel just turned out to be a completely useless character. What was the point of him, other than a way of showing again what a STOOPID decision it was to have Rogue take the cure? 'Oh look, here's this character we've never met and don't care about, taking a stand, embracing who he is, differences and all, and refusing the cure. How wonderful and brave and noble. And here's Rogue, who we know and love, who has grown and matured and become a member of the X-Men and now she's going to throw it all away on a boy who's already cheated on her once! But, you know, it all works out well 'cause now she can snuggle.' ARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

And then THEN they go and nullify EVERYTHING by implying that the cure is only temporary and Xavier might not really be dead and Magneto probably hasn't learned anything And in fact not a lot has changed except Jean and Scott are dead and all for frickin' nothing!

RAGE, I TELL YOU, PURE PHOENIX-LIKE RAGE.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Death, death, EVERYWHERE. I feel your rage, I do.

SIGH.

(And right! If the cure was for nil then WHAT DID THEY DIE FOR? What was the point of that whole plot? Just to kill everyone? WHAT?)

[denorios.livejournal.com]

It just seems like every single character got screwed over. Xavier gets killed but not! Magneto loses his power but not! Jean dies. Wolverine has to kill the woman he loves. Storm...well, hell, I barely even noticed Storm. Rogue takes the cure. Scott dies and doesn't even get the dignity of having his death seen on screen - it's just dismissed, and that made me so mad, by the way - the fact that they didn't even seem to look for Scott, by the way Wolverine is asking Jean later in the lab what happened to Scott? They found his glasses and then oops, there's Jean, let's just forget about Scott for now, shall we? WHAT?!

I'm sorry. I'm ranting here. X-Men 3 made me so mad.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Storm's plot was so weak. It barely existed. And it took me ages to fgure out that Scott was actually dead. No, really.

I have a thing against gratuitous death. Papa Winchester's death in SPN? A plot point. The deaths in X3? GRATUITOUS. And thinking about it, very few of them made any sense in the scheme of things. *stabby motions*

Lol. Carry on! I can't believe I wasted my time on it today. I feel like I should watch the three movies in sequence just so I can pinpoint, like, 10 exact reasons why X3 sucked ass.

[denorios.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm fine with deaths that serve a purpose, that further the storyline or impact on other characters. And whilst I know the death doesn't always have a purpose and sometimes people do just die for no reason, this isn't real life we're talking here, it's the movies. And gratuitous death, when it's characters you've grown to know and love, just pisses me off.

To use a Buffy example, if I may - Tara's death, whilst I hated it because I loved Tara, served a purpose. Joyce's death served a purpose. Anya's death did not. And that made me mad. If you expect people to love the characters you've created you should at least then respect them enough to give them a proper sendoff and not screw them over.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. In fact, what you and I are talking about isn't death because sometimes people just die (a la Joyce dying in Buffy). Gratuitous death is death in the place of a decent plotline.

HAHA. You used Buffy as an example and I hadn't even read your whole comment before doing the same. Talk about irony. (And yes, Anya's death was so...it was like, okay, someone has to die. Pick one!)

[denorios.livejournal.com]

Great minds, darling, great minds...