X-Men: The Last Stand
It’s been 2139 days since I wrote about X-Men:
I am long familiar with and a fan of the (Uncanny) X-Men. I actually thought this was the perfect film for Hollywood. Change any history, kill any character—the comics do it every few years. Reviews were coming in from fan and action fan and non-fan alike that this was a good’n’.
But it wasn’t to be.
The filmmakers didn’t ruin X-Men. In fact, they obviously went out of their way and bent over backwards to make this a faithful adaption. Unfortunately, like John Peel (of Doctor Who and Star Trek novels infamy) they’re earnestness cannot compensate for their lack of talent. There is no vision, intelligence, wit, or skill here.
If you had a thousand monkeys with a thousand Hollywood hits and a thousand non-linear editing boxes, this is what you might get. It’s not so much a story as a collection of familiar references to other stories so that you know when to boo, when to cry, etc. It’s all so small and dull and disappointing. Automatic for the people.
And like the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but even more guilty for they are following directly in the footsteps of the Great Changer (Chris Claremont), they don’t realise that X-Men is neither action nor thriller nor “superhero” film. It’s a soap.
[…]
But can a movie, such as X-Men, ever bring us soap?
Yes and no.
No, we could never have the real breadth of a soap in a cinematic setting, unless one is proposing a series of movies, one every few days, which could never succeed.
Yes, we could climb off our snobby horse and take back our storytelling heritage from the classicists and lit heads. We could, as appreciators of the X-Men mythos, craft an excellent tale. It could be a dense cornucopia, an intricate tapestry, a rich meal of a film. Real references, not handwaves. (My proposal would simply be X-Men #25.)
I haven’t rewatched X-Men since that day in Sydney with Rich and Dave, but—after X-Men: The Last Stand—I’d like to (with Pen, who did like it). My view hasn’t changed in the interim, though it has been refined. I now think Next Gen is just fine, and Claremont is no hero; I now accept that superhero films are action films. I still think that Bryan Singer needed to explode, not reduce, his story, ditch the origin, and just pack the film with stuff and let the audience figure it out.
As I said about Batman Begins:
I’d like to see more movies follow X2. Almost no issues of comics are origin stories. Almost no episodes of TV series are origin stories. Yet most people must have come in after #1 or the pilot and not been too confused.
Okay, X-Men didn’t have origin stories like most superhero films, giving us an elegant 15 seconds of narration instead, but it did spend a lot of time on introductions.
But then came X2.
I remember coming out of the cinema with Andrew Lee, a day or so after seeing the second Matrix film. There was no question about which was the more exciting and inventive film. X2 introduced a swag of characters and storylines and didn’t feel the need to give us more origin; I claimed it didn’t need the first film, it forced the audience to understand it alone. And if superhero films are action rather than romance, X2 is a superior action film, with fast, furious, knock-’em-dead fights in a style all of its own.
But I was worried about the third film, because of its production worries (which we will not—not—go into here), and because the end of X2 set up the thought in my head that it was a middle film. Perhaps it was only so strong because the makers thought they had an origin in X-Men and would deliver an end in The Last Stand?
When Jean apparently killed Scott, I started to hope. When she disintegrated Charles, I knew this “last stand” would be a great film. After the credits had rolled and the final scene of the film played, I felt both justified and satisfied.
The Last Stand has a quality I love, that of shattering expectations.
It starts with what should be the humblest characteristic, but which has become all too rare these days: it is itself. It does not rip off or ape other films, does not cram itself with pop culture references, is not “pomo”. Most importantly for an action film, it keeps faith with X2 and does not imitate The Matrix.
Beyond that start, The Last Stand finds solutions to various problems with superhero films, action movies and blockbusters, swerves away from convention, and successfully brings to the screen elements of the page not previously adapted.
Superhero films are action films, while superhero comics are romances. In the alchemy that turns one into the other, the injunction that superheroes don’t kill has always been preserved, though uncomfortably. Action films spend too much—yet not enough—time defending this point, typically ending with some contradictions, and always unsatisfactorily. The Last Stand normalises relations with the action genre, allowing Ororo and her team (like Neo or James Bond or Indiana Jones) to kill.
This is an extension of the performance of Logan, neatly introduced in X2, and repeated here. Logan is the solution to all those prolonged solo slugfests in action films, where the hero takes brutal punishment. Instead, Logan kills by the dozen and bounces back like a cartoon. It makes for more dynamic and less bloody action, and is just one of the moves that subtly complicates the “realism” of cinema.
The violence is physical, emotional, and surprising: killing Scott, killing Charles, de-powering Mystique, de-powering Magneto, killing Jean. These are amazing scenes (and one non-scene) that are unimaginable in any other movie. It’s not just that no character or relationship is safe, but that no expectation is safe.
In terms of adaptation, the death of Scott, off-screen and unconfirmed, is the most radical, as jarring as the death of Marion Crane in Psycho, blowing away almost thirty years of tradition in telling the Scott/Jean/Logan story. But that tradition is itself rooted in broader conventions that are also set a-sway here: the way a heroic love triangle can unfold; the way continuing characters must be treated; etc.
But The Last Stand never rests on its laurels or wallows; it’s all about the movement. Again and again it sets up the promise of a storyline (Scott/Jean, Charles the Manipulator, Marie/Bobby/Kitty, Magneto/Mystique, etc) then moves on. Some of these stories are abruptly abandoned, some of them are simply left in suspension.
Related to this is the way characters are thrown at us by the hundred. For the more prominent ones we are given a name, some dialogue, a relationship. The stars get some motivations and a few follow-up actions. Then that’s it—move on. All these personalities and lives are left as the merest suggestions to work at our imaginations.
It avoids overdeveloping all the cliches that are trotted out to support the interesting parts of so many films, doing away with that dubious and tired old checklist: “acting”, “characterisation”, “theme”, “plot”, “direction”, “special effects”… (though it has those things, it is not beholden to the way mainstream reviewers understand them).
Forget the distinctive names and costumes of comics. Forget the character traits and back stories of movies. The Last Stand has fully developed a superhero movie aesthetic of powers. It is through powers that characters are identified and through powers that they act. It is through powers that the story is told.
And this is where the tales of the X-Men divert most clearly from the Matrix trilogy. The Matrix established a premise for powers and ended with the promise of more… but the sequels mostly gave us more of the same—and less, spending squalid time in Zion. X-Men established a premise for powers; X2 upped (way up) the ante; The Last Stand goes crazy, revelling in its powers.
Mystique’s mind games, Magneto’s convoy crushing, Jean’s surrealisation of the lake and her family home, Bobby freezing the fountain, Logan impaling himself while goring his opponent, Multiple Man’s threat multiplication, Magneto moving the Golden Gate Bridge, Juggernaut chasing Kitty… the possibilities are endless… and with the richness of the premise, who needs experiments gone wrong, or aliens, or magic, though I wonder if the series couldn’t absorb that at this point…
This is a great film.
This is a great action movie.
I saw it with Pen and Rob and Suzie and we all loved it. We caught up with Andrew Lee the next day: he loved it.
And this is the best action adaptation of a superhero comic yet.
Like the comics I picked up in the early 90s, it never ends. The Last Stand isn’t the final film in a trilogy; it doesn’t bring closure to the first two films. It starts some time after the second film—when, in fact, Charles has dismissed the end of that film. X2 is cast as just another adventure, as is The Last Stand. And it doesn’t even end with any finality to make a weak trilogy, where other superhero films smash their villains and give their heroes final peace: Magneto gets his powers back, Charles returns, we know that Jean—the Phoenix—can return, we never saw Scott’s body… The Last Stand is just an entry in a series. Like the comics, which never started and never ended, things keep happening.
Yet, the comics still tell these stories that have big ends, just like the movie, even knowing it can never be the end. I loved this openness in the comics and I’m glad to see it finally adapted into a movie.
Apiece with this are: the huge casts of characters, given only a few characteristics for the reader to latch on to; the changing of the guard, not being beholden to any team line-up; references and hints to other storylines past, ongoing, and future; the suggestiveness of story elements themselves; the seemingly arbitrary way in which things might crop up or disappear or linger… All now showing on a big screen near you.
And finally, there is the fantasy and the wildness that all of the above, and more, gives to comics. Superhero movies have traditionally been so staid in what they would accept, their mainstream plausibility requirements set very stringently. I think The Last Stand has finally broken them open.
But perhaps you should not trust me? I say I am a fan of the X-Men and comics, but what do I mean? I started reading my friends’ comics with X-Men #1. I got hold of and read something like Uncanny X-Men #250–300, X-Men #1–35, X-Factor #80–100, and Wolverine #70–90. Oh, and Stryfe’s Strike File. Though, I remember, before all that, there was a prized issue of Classic X-Men that reprinted Uncanny X-Men #96. I loved this stuff!
More recently I read Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, though I skipped out on #135–150 because I couldn’t stand the Quitely fill-in artists. (I know, I missed out on Riot at Xavier’s.)
And more recently I read Essential X-Men #2, featuring the Proteus, and the Hellfire Club, and Dark Phoenix… and I didn’t like any of it except Scott and Days of Future Past. Claremont was too overwritten for the Mighty Marvel style; and Byrne’s art was just rubbish. These are the classics?
(I’ll give Roy Thomas and Werner Roth a try next.)
So maybe I’m not well-read enough. So maybe don’t trust me.
What do my fellow bloggers think?
Jim Roeg thinks the surface of the film betrayed the depth. Ragnell thinks there’s not enough Scott, too much Logan. Patrick Meaney (as always) thought there wasn’t enough decompression. Geoff Klock though it was just crap.
Thomas thought it was wonderful, surreal art cinema. Billy Black thought it was pretty good. Mark Fisher loved it (though I’m afraid I didn’t follow what he had to say about it). And Tim O’Neil came closest to my own position:
When I was talking about Brokeback Mountain the other day I mentioned the tendency of most American movies to bang on in such a monotonously obvious fashion with the seeming assumption that the average filmgoer has an IQ of about thirty. Well, surprisingly, X-Men 3 scored pretty high in this regard. It gives the audience a lot of credit for being able to figure things out without being hit on the head with repetitive exposition. I’ve already seen some complaints that there were too many characters introduced with not enough information, which is just silly. The school of storytelling that says that every onscreen character needs a fully-developed backstory and active motivation just bogs the proceedings down. In a movie like this, you don’t need to really know who Colossus is or what his family life is like or what his favorite color is: you just need to know that he’s a big metal guy who kicks ass. I don’t think there was a single audience member at the screening I saw who was confused by Colossus or Kitty Pryde or Callisto or Madrox the Multiple Man—they knew who the characters were by what they did, which may sound simplistic but that’s essentially how drama should work.
(Make sure you read all of the posts linked above: lots of good stuff, by intelligent people, even when I don’t agree. Speaking of things you should read, also check out (or re-read!) Jim Roeg’s analysis of the four problems with adapting superhero comics to film, which is relevant.)
(What did others think? Plok? David Fiore? Rose Curtin? Steven Berg?)