{ 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]

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...