An Enquiry Concerning the X-men Trilogy
When a movie shatters box office records, there are bound to be some topics which merit discussion.
Such is the case with X3.
Now don’t get me wrong. For the most part, the movie itself isn’t remarkable. It isn’t terribly memorable. Few things are particularly well done. It has terrible physics, even for a comic book movie. The flick is like a black hole from which no logic can escape. It’s a typical summer blockbuster: more of a widget than a piece of art. X3, to me, feels like MIB2: entertaining enough but nothing special. Or maybe X3 is just X-Men 1 in reverse. I’m still wondering when Wolverine gained the ability to heal his shirts…
Be these things as they may, the film does afford us a longer running time with which to examine this celluloid world of mutants, evil mutants, and allegory. We’ll break it down to a couple of discussion topics.
(As a note, I have purposefully avoided reading the myriad reviews of this film both on this site and from other “more traditional” sources.)
Everybody is a freaking mutant?
It seems to be the case in our X trilogy, that every super-being is a mutant. While the X-Men comics have always been mutant-centric, they have never been exclusively so. The films offer us no aliens, nor cyborgs, nor supersuits, nor mutated insects, no ninjas, no pirates, no government created mutant hunting over people, etc.
Even actively avoiding people’s reactions to X3, one will still note the shared sense of, “HEY! Juggernaut is not a mutant!” This sentiment isn’t limited to comic geeks either. That Fox channel Saturday morning X-Men cartoon holds a special place in the memories of many. When a 20 year old girl is talking about “X-Men” that cartoon is the basis of her knowledge of these things. She knows that Juggs is a magic-based super-being, and wonders why the filmmakers would use the Juggernaut character if they weren’t going to use the Juggernaut character.
But I digress.
Making every super-being a mutant serves to simplify the X-films in two ways.
A. It mitigates the need for origin stories. This reason is why Stan Lee started using mutants in the first place. We don’t need any explanation for Storm’s fantastic powers. She was born with them, or they developed during adolescence or whatever. She wasn’t bitten by a radioactive sirocco. No origin stories means more efficient storytelling, though not necessarily better storytelling.
B. It separates things into simple Manichaean terms. Black or White, human or mutant. This thing lead us into the next topic:
Mutants are pigeonholed!
The X-films depend on this discrete separation of mutants and humans. You are either dealing with Homo Sapiens or Homo Superior. But the thing is, this lessens the relevance of the films’ allegories. The topics that X-Men films deal with tend towards more abstract constructs than exclusive categories.
It is tempting to see the world in the black and white terms of X-Men movies, but not appropriate. For instance, say we treat a segment in X-Men as a metaphor for race. Humans are discriminating against mutants, mutants are discriminating against humans, whatever. In the X-world there is no possibility for overlap. In real life, we got Tiger Woods. In reality, race is merely a set of characteristics which certain members of certain groups may match. You don’t have just black people, white people, Asian people, etc. You have The Rock, you’ve got Lenny Kravitz, you have people that deny traditional categorization. We’ve got categories, sure, but there is overlap.
If Kinsey is to believed, the same holds true for sexuality. It isn’t as simple as gay and straight, and most everybody falls somewhere in the middle of two extremes.
The same goes for any allegory towards immigration. There are recent immigrants, less recent immigrants, even less recent immigrants, folks whose families came with the Pilgrims, Native American who probably came over to America from Asia, etc. If some are to believed, we all came from Africa, anyway. Some of use just took a longer time and a different route in getting to where we are.
In real life, most of this social taxonomy exists as arbitrary constructions. The lines between races are mostly imaginary. The X-Men films deny this thing, validating a tenet of the causes which they profess to fight.
Furthermore, what distinguishes a human from a mutant in these movies? A friend of mine has a double uvula. Is he a mutant? If he got shot with the cure, would the extra one cease to be? Would the Mutant Cure work to fight cancer, which is malignant mutation?
And now, for something completely different…
The Next Harrison Ford?
For a while folks have been searching for the next heir apparent to the action movie throne. We have our Vins, our Rocks, that dude from Transporter, but when it comes down to it, these guys are wannabe Willises, shoulda Slys, and almost Arnolds.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you THE big action star of the new millennium… A man prominent in no less than 7 smash hit blockbusters, and whose films have already grossed about 2/3 of a billion dollars THIS YEAR ALONE… Fuck Hugh Jackman…. we’re talking Sir Ian McKellen.
He’s currently numbers 1 and 2 at the box office! Okay, so fine he is a villain in both films, but still.
Craziness.
I feel like Samantha Stevens!
Am I the only one who would have liked one line of dialogue that mentioned how Hank McCoy changed from a normal looking Steve Bacic to a furry blue Kelsey Grammer between X2 and X3?
Although, if you want to get into it, let’s see who has the Kitty. We’ve now had three movies and three different Kitty Prydes. Am I not supposed to notice this thing? We started with Sumela Kay, switched over to Katie Stuart, and now have Ellen Page. C’mon now. If the studio replaces Page with George Clooney for X4, I’ll know something is up.
I mean, they kept the same Jubilee from the second to the third movie… Although she was different in the first. Shit…
What a waste…
Okay, so the story of X3 had Kitty being a pretty useful character. She uses her power in a clever way in an attempt to stop Juggernaut, she is eventually able to defeat Juggernaut, etc. But the script and the direction was reluctant to give her any sort of personality whatsoever. What a bland, nothing character. The same goes for Colossus who isn’t even allowed to have his complex comic book personality of “large Russian.” That same blandness is given to Angel, and pretty much every other character introduced in X3
X3 really had some blown opportunities. The woman of Sand and Fog was relegated to a nothing part which she, in turn, phoned in. The Phoenix Saga felt like a tacked on sub-plot (oh wait… it was). Cyclops was unceremoniously killed off-screen. Seemingly hundreds of mutants were introduced merely to be “cured” and or “sploded”.
But most frustrating, the flick squandered moments of potential creativity. These things really got to my wife in particular. She logically reasoned, “Wouldn’t most of the mutants in line for the cure not be passable as humans?” and “What is the point of doing a large scale mutant battle if the majority of the mutants fight generically? These guys have powers, they shouldn’t need to punch and kick so much.”
Get a life (outside the movie)
The X-films tend to eliminate any and all back story other than the shared history of Magneto and Professor X. The flicks don’t even want to imply back story. In the X-movies, Wolverine isn’t at all connected to Sabretooth, Rogue isn’t connected to Mystique, Juggernaut isn’t related to Professor X, Storm was never worshiped as a goddess, Colossus isn’t Russian, mutants never seem to cause any trouble outside of America, and nobody lives in the sewers under the X-mansion.
What the hell? The X-Men trilogy shows mutants existing as early as World War II. But I guess they didn’t do much of anything until Wolverine showed up at the X-Mansion in the not too distant future. Even Wolverine seemed to do nothing but beat up random Canadians in the twenty years prior to the first X-Men.
Bah.
He’s not my Wolverine
I might be the only person in the world who doesn’t care for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. I mean, it is a fine character, I guess, but it isn’t my Wolverine. He’s tall instead of short. He’s lanky instead of stocky. He’s smooth instead of hairy. He talks way too much. His healing factor works too quickly. Now, these things are not critiques of Mr. Jackman’s performance, but rather his casting and script.
I will say Halle Berry’s X-performances suck on toast. Goddamn.
Pimp(s)
Lucard talks Eternal Darkness. This game was the first thing I played on my Gamecube. It was the game that made by broke ass suck it up and spend money on a memory card. It was a summer spent in a darkened living room passing that strange Nintendo controller back and forth, taking turns with each chapter until finally all control was relinquished to the most competent player and everybody else just sat and watched. It is a nice game to watch.
And that elephant gun kicks like a f*cking mule…
