A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

In a rare display of generosity I will spare you, dear reader, of any rants above this fold and just give you my general impression of the movie:

It’s entertaining. It’s slick. It’s fun (at times). If you have time to spare or would rather not go to your root canal appointment, then this is a good movie to watch.

Continue and you’ll be subjected to fanboy rants. And yes there will be spoilers. Fair warning.

Brett Ratner is a ham-handed hack, subtle as a bag of ball-peen hammers dropped on your head.

I know it’s fashionable to bash Ratner in favor of Bryan Singer these past few days but I believe in keeping an open mind. Up until I saw the movie. Kelsey Grammer as the Beast was an inspired choice. The action sequences were epic as billed. There are mutants galore to make it fun for comic geeks to play Name That Mutant. While both directors maybe both adept in wielding the talent, the technological and financial resources in their command the main differences is this: Singer cared for the material.

Granted movies could not be the exact translation of the books or the comics which inspired them. But while Singer indeed took liberties in translating these beloved mutants to the screen, he was careful not to mess with the essence by which these books were successful: that the “mutants” are a metaphor to stand for the minorities in society, that Magneto and Professor Xavier both strive for acceptance of the mutant population although they have different methods for achieving it, that the heart and soul of Professor Xavier’s dream is Scott Summers and Jean Grey.

Sure, Singer’s movies were not perfect. He didn’t have the original core X-Men (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Angel, Beast) in the first two movies but decided to mix it up with Wolverine and Storm and reverted Iceman to a teen-age new mutant discovering his abilities to better relate with a younger Rogue and the rest of the young mutants (and a younger movie going demographic). He used these character to serve a cinematic purpose, to move the story along but kept the essence of what these characters are about intact. In fact some see Iceman confessing to his parents about him being a mutant as similar to teen-age soon coming out to his parents and confessing he’s gay. This scene never happened to Iceman in the comics (to my knowledge at least) but it helped illustrate what countless of writers and artists in the comic books try and attempt to communicate to readers: being different provokes fear and misunderstanding even to your loved ones. The drama of course is how that individual deals with it (Pyro in the movie didn’t care, Iceman tries to make them understand he’s still their son regardless) and how the people around them accepts or resents it. While Singer was delivering this “message” he’s also tasked to make a big action-packed movie.

Okay, the point is Singer cared for the source material. Now you have Ratner’s Sins:

* Killing off Professor X. (Yeah I know about the epilogue.)
* Killing off Scott Summers
* Too much Wolverine.
* Too many mutants with too little to do.
* Pyro as a glorified flame thrower.
* Magneto as a terrorist with little imagination.
* Giving Magneto an Evil Bad Guy Cave hideout.
* That stupid looking Juggernaut helmet.
* Rebecca Romijn naked. I shouldn’t complain about that but…
* The Angel, the Angel’s dad plotline.
* The setting: Alcatraz prison as a the HQ for the mutant cure.
* The setting: San Francisco as the scene for the epic final battle.
* Having Bolivar Trask appear and no mention of the Sentinel program (yeah I know a Sentinel appears in the Danger Room but they made no connection with Trask)
* Apparently, mutants that are not with the X-Men are goths and have tattoos.
* Rogue giving up on her abilities because of some boy.
* Phoenix: the Human Shredder! No mess! No blood! Just really tiny CGI-ed pixels! (I guess for the PG-13 rating.)

The X-Men is about tragedy and struggle. They are not the Avengers which were formed to save the world. They are not the Fantastic Four who are trapped into being celebrity superheroes. Prof. X lost the use of legs but soldiered on to form the X-Men and pursue the dream of peaceful coexistence with humans. Scott Summers continued being an X-Man and continued believing in Xavier’s dream despite a) 2 wives dying, b) sons and daughters from the future coming back with serious father issues, c) losing most of his family to betrayal and space-faring pirates. Cyclops is the First X-Man. Cyclops and Jean Grey’s love story is the heart of the X-Men. Not Wolverine. Not Storm. (Then again if the movie production company is owned by the guy playing Wolverine and you have an Oscar-winning actress as Storm, I guess it would be different. Feh. ) Ratner decided to kill off Prof. X and Cyclops early in the movie. From there, it’s all about adamantium claws and snappy one-liners. (Yes I know about comics Cyclops boinking the White Queen. I don’t care. The point is, he’s still with the X-Men despite all the crap he’s been through.)

Ratner (yes I blame him for the choices his screenwriters made) decides to set it in San Francisco. I guess the thinking there goes: “Oooooh! The X-Men is about being gay and coming out? Let’s set in San Francisco because, get it? There’s like a ton of gay people there. And it would controversial to set a ‘cure’ for mutants there. See, it’s like metaphor for giving a cure to being homosexual, right? So many layers there! Oh yeah and have the first mutant to try out the cure be Angel because he’s like the gayest character in the X-Men.” Ham-handed I say.

First off, what pharmaceutical company (or any company who likes to keep making money for that matter) sets a PR event that would antagonize a segment of the population in a famous prison? It’s like building a photo developing station for the Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison. Second, what other purpose did the character Angel serve aside from his escape from his father’s pharma company? He was basically IGNORED by the X-Men when he went to New York (and boy were his arms tired!). The character of Angel was largely there for decorative purposes like most of the mutants which appeared in the movie. Singer’s approach was to limit the recognizable mutants and if he did use them, they play a major role in moving the story. They could’ve used Angel during the final battle (because the X-Men themselves recognized they’re outnumbered) and see how the evil mutants kill his dad. That would have made him the heir of his father’s fortune, and halt production of the Cure.

The Cure to genetic mutation is of course the central premise of the whole movie. A corporation, headed by Angel’s father, has found a way to harness a mutant’s ability to suspend other mutant’s abilities. The corporation and the government decided to offer this cure to the mutant population. Of course Magneto goes all militant and organizes an army. Prof. X took a more “wait and see attitude” despite Storm’s protestations that “there’s nothing to cure”. Of course, inevitably the cure would be used on the higher profile mutants eg: Mystique and Magneto. Mystique being reduced to a human served no purpose to the story except to highlight Magneto’s disdain for normals. And also to show Rebecca Romijn naked I guess.

More poignant would’ve been to have Forge, a mutant with the ability to make gadgets, show up and be credited for extracting the mutation cure from Leech for the Worthington company. They could’ve made that cure take away Storm’s powers. Storm, who didn’t see a need for a cure, would be especially angry at this. The conflict there would be the see whether she would take the path of Magneto or still work at Prof. X’s dream. Would she still stay in the Mansion and take over for Xavier as the Professor wanted? In the comic book, Storm challenged Callisto for the leadership of the Morlocks, mutants who lived in the sewer system of New York. Callisto is not as radical as Magneto but believed mutants should live separately from the normals. Callisto in the movie was given Caliban’s, another Morlock, ability to detect other mutants. Movie Callisto gave Storm a hard time. Of course, Callisto gets her ass handed to her by Storm in the end (the crowd actually cheered when this finally happened) but she’s ultimately just another mutant minion of Magneto. Magneto recruited Callisto and a bunch of other mutants in leather, and sporting tattoos, in a community meeting. Apparently that’s were Magneto recruits for his Brotherhood — a neighborhood Mutant’s Anonymous meeting. Were they the Morlocks? It wasn’t clear.

Magneto has a secret Bad Guy Cave in the movie. (I think he had one in the first one too.) It was just so cliched it looked horrible. I was waiting for him to stroke a white cat and say “can’t I have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads?”. I would think he would have enough imagination to just have the Phoenix obliterate Alcatraz from afar instead of bringing the fight to the soldiers who were waiting for them with plastic guns shooting syringes with the cure. (Again, Forge would’ve been a reasonable explanation for the sudden introduction of the nifty gadgets.) Magneto could’ve just a) make a bridge made of metal like in the first X-Men movie, b) levitated his troops to Alcatraz, c) have the Phoenix telekinetically drop the mutants unto the prison. But nooooo. He had to rip off the Golden Gate bridge to bring his troops to Alcatraz. Unfortunately, moving the bridge took time and it warned the soldiers against the attack. For a guy who managed to escape from a plastic prison, the whole bridge wasn’t particularly very creative. Looked good on screen though. Didn’t make sense but it looked good.

Also, in the movie Rogue goes off to get the cure so that she can make out with her boyfriend Iceman. I’ve always accepted the movie Rogue-Iceman relationship as the analog for the Rogue-Gambit relationship. The drama in the Rogue-Gambit relationship is that with Rogue’s abilities they can not express their love physically. But Rogue never wanted her abilities gone; she just wanted to control it. Again that’s the essence of being an X-Man: learn to deal with your abilities despite the hardships that it might impose on your existence. In the movie, Rogue thinks the Iceman is so horny (as she pointed out JUST BECAUSE HE’S A GUY — talk about reverse sexism) she went out to have her powers removed just to be with him. Easy way out. How disappointing.

Ratner also decided to use Juggernaut in the movie. The comic book Juggernaut was Xavier’s stepbrother. He’s not a mutant. His powers came from a mystical gem which granted him physical strength and invulnerabilities. So if Ratner made him a mutant (because he was among the prisoners in the mobile prison the government uses for mutant prisoners) he doesn’t need the frickin’ helmet which inspired Kitty Pryde to call him a ‘dickhead’. The comic book Juggernaut wears a skullcap and a helmet to prevent telepathic attacks from his stepbrother, very much the same reason why Magneto wears his helmet. This, however, wasn’t established in the movie. He could have very well been running around without the stupid helmet like the rest of the mutants in the movie. They already took liberties in the costume of the X-Men why not do the same, if it made sense, to the villains? Also: if there was a Pyro-Iceman showdown, why not a Juggernaut - Colossus face-off? (Goof alert: when Kitty Pryde phased Juggenaut to the floor, he shouldn’t have been able to break out of it, because as Pyro earlier read off the file, Juggernaut needs momentum to become unstoppable.)

And why does Wolverine keep running off alone despite the brewing tension and an ultimatum from Storm? (Of course Rogue also ignored him after a heartfelt talk.) That scene in the forest with Magneto could’ve been done during the Grey residence encounter if they just want to establish that Magneto can manipulate Wolverine’s adamantium bones and have the pay-off at the end. It would’ve been more satisfying if they had shown Wolverine’s berseker rage during the epic battle instead of that highlight reel with him fighting the baddies in the forest. Singer and Ratner has said that the X-Men movies were a trilogy. If that was the case, this third movie barely completes the arc traced by the two movies. In part, the first two movies was about Wolverine. The first one was about Wolverine discovering the X-Men. The second was an exploration of Wolverine’s past. This third movie doesn’t add anything to the Wolverine character except we’ve found out that his mutant healing abilities has increased in speed and makes him virtually invulnerable (nevermind if a bullet in the noggin knocked him unconscious for a minute or two in the second movie). That and he has Phoenix-proof underwear.

But that’s just me. I won’t even bother nitpicking the awful dialogue. If you enjoyed the movie, good for you. As for me, I’m now less apprehensive about Singer’s Superman and more wary of any future Ratner movies. That means you, Rush Hour 3!