Why the Hate?
X3 isn’t bad at all. There’s the unfortunate “Plan 9 From Outer Space Moment” involving the timing of the assault on Alcatraz. In a couple of places the scripting goes flat. And man are they skating over the line with the early Juggernaut scenes. But there are a lot of nice touches and it’s a creditable cocktail of blenderized X-Men plots and tropes. Likes: Ian McKellan has totally nailed and redefined Magneto at the same time with his work in the trilogy. The SFX for Phoenix’s obliteration of people is pretty cool. Kelsey Grammar is an absolute treat. It was fun to see Shohreh Aghdashloo’s 24 afterlife. I liked Ellen Page as Kitty Pride quite a lot. Eric Dane really popped during the few Jamie Madrox, Multiple Man scenes.
Can I admit to not knowing who Porcupine Boy is “really?”
I’d be tempted to call this the best of the three X-movies. How’s that for heresy? Maybe I’ll change my mind on further reflection.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 11, 2006 @ 2:53 am
Well, Jim, I wrote at great length about the reviews here, and then gave my own here, but I guess I was boring. I was yet more boring here.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 11, 2006 @ 2:56 am
Incidentally, if you might comment on my blog one out of 100 times I comment on yours, that would be lovely. Just a thought.
Comment by Frank —
June 11, 2006 @ 7:41 am
I liked it too, but I think part of what offends about X3 is that it could have been a masterpiece. There were some brilliant bits.
Comment by Hesiod —
June 11, 2006 @ 7:55 am
I liked X3 as well. I think what angered fanboys was the way the X-Men mythos was jumbled around. But I thought Ratner did his duty to throw in a few clasic nuggets.
The Danger Room sequence where they are battling a sentinel, the Cannonball fighting maneuver where Colossos tosses Wolverine like a football. Hank McCoy hanging yupside down while engaged in reading the paper. And so on.
Of course, X-Men purists will be all P’O’d that Kitty was making googly-eyes with Bobby Drake rather than Peter Rasputin (who apparentlty is no loger Russian, but from Iowa or something).
I thought the tpry was pretty good, actually.
And, I think it would be an interesting idea to follow up on the X-Men comic book, and have Eric Magnus take over as the head of the Xavier School in the next movie.
His motive sowuld alsway be questioned by the X-Men, and there would be tension between Magneto, Storm and Wolverine.
Comment by Justin Slotman —
June 11, 2006 @ 10:38 am
X3 was okay on its own terms, but soooooo much less than the previous two. A film guy out on the internets somewhere called this the Return of the Jedi of X-Men movies, and I couldn’t agree more. There were so many terrible moments that just didn’t exist in the first two films:
–The hammiest, most awful portrayal of the US President in a major film probably ever. ”Hell hath no fury” = ”You rebel scum” in the journey of the X-films into Cheesetown.
–Another ROTJ parallel: Obi-Wan’s ”a certain point of view” and Professor X suddenly a jerk who’s been messing with Jean’s brain for a decade.
–That scene where Magneto rescues Mystique and Madrox and Juggernaut just randomly decide to join up with him.
–The final battle: six X-Men versus a zillion mutants whose powers apparently involve getting killed really really easy.
–Hey, let’s have R. Lee Ermey do a random, incongruous voiceover that sticks out like a sore thumb!
–You know–if you didn’t know the ”I’m the Juggernaut, bitch” line was an Internet phenomenon, you might think it was sort of stupid. And what’s the point of a giant helmet if you get knocked out when you run into a wall?
–”What have I done?” AAARRRRGGGHH
All these things exist only in the Ratnerian anti-aesthetic, and would be replaced with actual meaningful moments in a Singer film. Plus Jean would never kill Scott (but this is X-Men, who knows if he’s actually dead), the Bobby-Rogue-Kitty triangle was graceless and perfunctory, there was no gravity to Rogue’s decision, too little Cyclops, Psylocke is too major an X-character to be dispatched like she was, etc. And too much Halle Berry.
Oh, and remember the end of X2? There was this phoenixy image in Alkali Lake? I wonder what all that was about.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
June 11, 2006 @ 5:20 pm
I’m with Justin. Disclaimer: I am not a reader of X-Men comics nor have I watched the animated series. My comics tastes were Batman and Spiderman, and I stopped reading when I was a teenager. I have seen the other 2 movies often (The Camera has fondnesses for Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart). X3 was not bad, but it did leave me disappointed in comparison to its two predecessors, so I think the ROTJ comparison is apt. Here’s hoping there won’t be episodes 1, 2, and 3 in twenty years.
Comment by Steve —
June 11, 2006 @ 5:31 pm
The hammiest, most awful portrayal of the US President in a major film probably ever.
”Okay, thend them in!” has become a catchphrase in my household. Jim, you’re totally off on this — it was loads worse than X2. Ignoring all the points Justin raises, most of which I agree with (and some of which I think are actually too kind), the climactic battle scene was just dreadful. Hint: battle cinematography is hard. Sloppy writing, sloppy moviemaking.
Ellen Page was great, though.
Comment by Camera Obscura —
June 11, 2006 @ 8:38 pm
X3 was a gawdawful jumble. They tried to do either do too much or use too many mutants, dunno which (maybe both?). They tried to make it a drama and an action-adventure, and failed to get a passing grade on either.
As a X-movie it was meh (but at least not feh). As a regular movie it was meh. I walked out wishing I’d at least have gone to the matinee, rather than paying weekend prime-time price. I’m with Frank.
(imho)And Rogue would never have gone ”normal” if they’d have brought in Gambit in X2 for something more than a two-second cameo. I got all up for him when I saw things going ”foom” in the early previews, then it turned out it was just that stupid boy.(/imho)
Comment by Mike Kozlowski —
June 11, 2006 @ 8:42 pm
Of course it was worse than X2. But it wasn’t worse than the first one, which has gotten a lot of credit for being a good superhero movie in the era before there were good superhero movies, but isn’t all that great now that there are tons of good superhero movies.
Comment by Avram —
June 11, 2006 @ 8:59 pm
The whole Phoenix plotline seemed to be it’s own little movie, sitting next to the main movie. They should have either left it out, or actually done more with it.
Oh, and Mystery Men was the first great superhero movie.
Comment by Andrew Olmsted —
June 11, 2006 @ 10:54 pm
Concur with Avram. They needed to pick one plot and run with it. By trying to tie the Phoenix plot into the ’mutant cure’ stuff, they ended up failing on both counts. The Phoenix plot could have and should have been truly dramatic, but instead it seemed rather flat because they didn’t spend very much time with it.
And the horde of mutants should have been trimmed down so we could actually get to know a few of them.
Comment by Steve —
June 12, 2006 @ 7:23 am
The whole Phoenix plotline seemed to be it’s own little movie, sitting next to the main movie. They should have either left it out, or actually done more with it.
My wife and I spent half an hour at cafe the next day plotting out a notional X3 and X4* (X4 had the Hellfire Club!), as one of the problems we felt the real X3 had was that Jean’s death fails to achieve any emotional weight. X3, in our vastly superior version that Marvel should pay us a lot of money for, was all Sentinel-boom-boom, with Jean’s reintroduction coming in as a flash at the end. In the real version, we get to see Scott being teary and useless for, what, 45 seconds? All the emotional weight is drained by her immediate reintroduction.
* Because we are nerds.
Comment by lee —
June 12, 2006 @ 7:33 am
I’ve seen it 2x already. I really enjoyed it. I liked it better than the first and as much as the second.
Comment by Greg Morrow —
June 12, 2006 @ 9:34 am
Concerning Hesiod’s comment: I’d like some cites to justify ”I think what angered fanboys was the way the X-Men mythos was jumbled around.”
I haven’t seen anybody bash the movie for failing to keep to comics continuity. Maybe I don’t read the immature comics fans, but every mature comics fan I know recognizes that different media almost always have different continuity.
No, what disappoints me about the film is that its events do not justify themselves. We are expected to uncritically accept Magneto’s plan of assault, Wolverine’s visit to the camp, and the rest. In the previous two movies, scenes didn’t need to be their own justification. Earlier scenes set up later scenes. You know, structure.
Taking William Goldman’s admonition that a script is structure, I can quite emphatically say that the script to X3 was considerably inferior to that of X2 and X1.
Also, take note of Jim Roeg’s discussion of how X3 confuses its layer of metaphor.
Comment by Kevin J. Maroney —
June 12, 2006 @ 12:10 pm
I think what angered fanboys was the way the X-Men mythos was jumbled around.
You would be hard-pressed to find someone who imprinted more heavily on the original Dark Phoenix story than I did, and I have to say that the ”jumbling” was not in my mind a problem at all. These are films using toys from the toybox of the comics world, not straight adaptations; doing what they wanted, intelligently, is what I expected. And, in fact, very little in X3 is more jumbled than all of X2. So that’s not it.
The biggest problem is exactly what Avram identified: The Phoenix storyline, which should have been an entire movie’s worth of emotional involvement, hung badly off of the mostly good Magneto vs. the Cure story.
It is an amazing combination of cheating and overkill to resolve a romantic triangle by killing two of the three sides. And one of them off-camera, at that!
Pingback by Some X3 Errors § Unqualified Offerings —
June 12, 2006 @ 9:30 pm
[...] away you guys are going to protest that you’re not making fannish objections at all. As Kevin J. Maroney puts it: You would be hard-pressed to find someone [...]
Comment by Avram —
June 12, 2006 @ 11:10 pm
Guys, I’m not saying they should have made a just-Phoenix movie. I’m saying they should have done either that, or done a better job of integrating the Phoenix stuff into this movie.
As it is, we had the a Phoenix who was so ravenous, hate-filled, and omni-destructive that she, um, stands around glowering a lot.