X-men 97' review

 
    X-MEN 97' is an interesting test study in just how much you can appeal to an older audience as opposed to a newer one. Pretty much everyone who watched X-men 92' is going to be in their late thirties and early forties as I just turned 44 while being sixteen when this series was originally out. However, it occurs to me that I played Batman: Arkham Asylum with the same appeal directly being made to my childhood with Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill right up until this age. 

    Just because something is nostalgia bait doesn't mean it doesn't work as bait and the fact that it is the X-men at their best, even more than the movies, is something that I am hardly going to complain about. DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE thrived on the X-men movies that weren't that different in the audience they were trying to appeal to.

    The premise for X-men 97' is that is a sequel taking place after the original animated series ended. Charles Xavier was seemingly assassinated by Henry Peter Gyrich (but moved to the Shi'ar Empire). As a result, there has been some small progress toward mutant-human coexistence. Jean Grey is also pregnant with Scott Summer's baby and they are thinking of leaving the X-men. However, there's something wicked afoot as the Friends of Humanity (a Far Right militia that feels a lot more relevant today than in 96') has found itself in possession of a large amount of Sentinel tech as well as other advanced weapons. The X-men manage to triumph over Master Mold in an early victory but are stunned to return to their home and find that Magneto has been left in charge of the X-men by Professor Xavier's will.

    I could spend a lot of time reciting the various plotlines of the first season, but I don't want to get into spoilers. Suffice to say, they're a mixture of a lot of X-men classics, which was the best decision the original series made in its run. There's a massive number of great stories adapted here from Inferno to Genosha's massacre to Operation: Zero Tolerance. There are some more questionable story beats like Rogue and Magneto's romance from the Age of Apocalypse but, overall, it does the correct thing in mining the comics' continuity for stuff worthy of adapting. Really, Disney should have done the same thing with the Star Wars Legends books.

    The returning cast has noticeably aged and Lenore Zann as Rogue is particularly noticeable since she's now 65. Alison Court has also been replaced as Jubilee for various reasons. Still, I really enjoyed the acting and there's a lot of great scenes carried by the stellar voice work. Everyone is also in character with the rare exception that Magneto occasionally comes off like a massive creeper to Rogue. Seriously, that romance is just all kinds of no even if he can touch her when no one else can.

    The plot is significantly more adult and if the original cartoon was a PG show, which was already pretty adult for its time, this is definitely PG-13. There are themes of genocide, references to the Holocaust, deaths of major characters, and a few political notations that have only gotten a small number of complaints about online. Mostly because Morph is now gender fluid, happily switching between sexes, and queer. Still, this is the X-men and if there was ever a franchise that proudly flew its progressive politics, it was this one.

    Overall, I really liked it, even if I wasn't a big fan of the ending. My favorite episode was the adaptation of Inferno that gives a lot more sympathy to Madelyne Pryor than the original comic. Also, her outfit rocks even if it's toned down from its original sexiness. My wife was equally pleased by the return of Gambit after decades of absence.

9/10

Deadpool 2 review

    Ah, Deadpool, the character who totally didn't have anything to do with the creation of Gary Karkofsky a.ka. Merciless: The Supervillain without Mercy. I didn't remotely draw from him, Spiderman, and Harry Dresden to create the 4th wall breaking wise-cracker who is still one of my all time favorite supporting characters. Wait, supporting characters?

    Yes, you see Deadpool is something of an acquired taste for me as I like him but only if he has someone who he can bounce off of. My favorite run of his series remains Cable and Deadpool, which was where the former was ultra-serious and a global messiah (long story) while the latter was just Deadpool. So, the discovery Cable was going to be the villain of this movie made it all the better.

X-Force are...not X-Force.

    Cable (Josh Brolin) is a great character for being an antagonist because he's a heroic character who is willing to break the rules in order to get the job done. It makes him a perfect foil for Deadpool who isn't at all heroic but manages to occasionally do the right thing by accident. He's also someone who has a recognizable backstory (time traveling super-soldier coming back in time to do X) that can be a font of Terminator jokes.

    The premise of Deadpool 2 irritates me a little, though. Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) are going to have a baby when she's mercilessly gunned down. This isn't a spoiler since it happens in the first five minutes of the movie. This irritated a lot of fans because of the Stuffed in a Fridge trope that is based on the idea the most useful thing you can do with a love interest is kill them off to induce manpain.

    Honestly, the romance element of the original Deadpool was criticized a lot but I think those people missed that Wade needs something to ground him. As such, this is the absolute laziest and stupidest plot they could have chosen to go with. Weirdly, despite this being a common and well-mocked trope in comics, it is played utterly straight in the game. I also liked Morena Baccarin so watching her character killed off was problematic.

Cable is great in this movie.

    Deadpool spends the first half of the movie trying to figure out what to do after he bungles his suicide involving rocket fuel and explosives. He tries joining the X-men, gets himself sent to prison to be depowered with a Genoshan-style restraining collar, and eventually finds himself befriending Rusty Collins. Rusty is a troubled young man who was implied to be molested by his mutant home manager but was definitely abused. Cable arrives then with plans to kill Rusty and the rest of the story is Deadpool's misguided attempts to save the boy from being retroactively killed.

    This movie is really entertaining but it does lean a little heavily into making fun of X-men mythology, which is a dangerous thing to do when fans are so fanatical about it. For example, the team of X-Force soldiers Deadpool assembles is a bunch of cannon fodder rather than actual heroes. This includes cult-favorite Shatterstar and action star Terry Crews as Bedlam. I also was annoyed that Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Yukio, two characters I really liked, had almost no screentime.

I absolutely loved Yukio and Negasonic Teenage Warhead.

    Despite these flaws, I really enjoyed the film. It has a lot of hilarious jokes and I laughed out loud several times, especially when Wade makes a fanboy joke like referencing the Goonies or My Little Pony. Josh Brolin does an excellent job as Cable and manages to be a great straight man to Deadpool. Zazie Beetz does an amazing job as Domino despite her not having much of a role other than looking awesome. Colossus also remains a character that needs his own movie, even if he is treated as a complete joke. Plus, we finally get a Juggernaut worth fighting even if the way he's dispatched is ridiculous.

    The movie is basically one long series of Marvel comics trivia and movie jokes interspersed with awesome fight scenes. Really, I didn't think they needed to up the stakes as much as they did because the film benefits from being lower key than the other X-men films. Still, I'm not going to complain about what we got because I like the plot is "just" about the fate of one child that Cable wants to murder and Deadpool wants to save. That's a more relatable and interesting level than Apocalypse trying to murder everyone.

    In conclusion, I really enjoyed Deadpool 2 but not as much as the first movie. I felt they jammed too much X-men Easter Eggs and relied on too much on a tired overused plot device. I'll definitely watch Deadpool 3 but I think they should dial down the cameos and get back to the relationships we care about. In other words, Deadpool already has a great supporting cast, use them instead of creating new ones.   

8/10

X-men: Days of Future Past review

    The X-men franchise had, with the exception of The Wolverine, seemingly run its course by the time this movie was announced. X-men: The Last Stand was widely believed to have killed the franchise and X-men Origins: Wolverine was beating nails into it. X-men: First Class was good but didn't reverse the damage done to the franchise's reputation.

    This one is a time-travel story.

    Hmm, dare they actually press the retcon button in-universe? That was the question which hung in my mind during all of this. I got my answer at the end of the movie but it doesn't really matter as the larger question of the movie is--is it good? All the retcons in the world won't fix bad storytelling.

    Short answer: Yes.

Ellen Page is awesome and a perfect Kitty Pryde. My teenage self is crushing on her.

    Long answer: It's the best of the X-men movies so far, better than X-men 2 and First Class put together. I'd argue that it's about middle-of-the-road for the Marvel movies, which is a great accomplishment given the Fox movies had been running on autopilot for some time now. Certainly, it's better than Thor: The Dark World.

    The premise of Days of Future Past is one of the classic stories of the X-men comic series. The robotic Sentinels have taken over the world and established a Nazi-influenced rule where humans are herded into camps, separated from 'pure' into groups based on the possibility of producing a mutant, exterminated, and that's it. It's a wonderfully dark future where the sun never shines ala The Matrix and humanity is on its last legs.

Charles Xavier as a stand-in for traumatized Vietnam vets is a clever bit--inappropriate, but clever.

    How bad have things gotten? Magneto and Charles Xavier have banded together, both of them putting aside their differences to realize the other had a point. Unfortunately, it's too late for such an alliance to have an affect.

    In a contradiction of every depiction of Amazo, the Super-Adaptoid, and other robots possessing the powers of multiple X-men--the new Nimrod class of Sentinel is capable of killing heroes. They really ARE too powerful for the X-men to fight. While we know they'll all get retconned away, the danger of the Sentinels is brought home by the number of mutants we see killed on-screen.

    I liked the band of mutants assembled to serve as the de-facto X-Force of the films. Blink, Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Bishop, Iceman, Sunspot, and Warpath were never a team in the comics but they work well together in the movie. Even if most of them barely have any dialogue, their fight scenes are a visual treat to behold. We also get a sense of a generation growing up in the aftermath of an apocalypse (no, not the big blue one).

The fact Fassbender is wearing that outfit unironically shows this movie has the courage of its convictions (it's actually better than the last movie's).

    Well, one of the mutants (Ellen Page's Kitty Pryde in this case) has developed the ability to send people back in time telepathically. I'm not sure what this has to do with phasing through walls but we'll chalk it up to secondary mutation. Charles Xavier and Magneto immediately hit on the idea of reversing this hopeless future but find the only one of them who can solve things is, of course, Wolverine. They need to stop the assassination of Bolivar Trask and Mystique being captured to harvest her DNA to build the Nimrod-type Sentinels.

    The 1970s portion of the movie is just as good as the future one, giving us both hilarious fashions as well as insights into the political situation of the time. Peter Dinklage's Bolivar Trask, sadly, remains a mystery. We never get a real sense of why he wants to destroy the mutant race, only that he considers them dangerous enough that he's conducting horrific experiments on them with Major Stryker. Also, whoever put Peter Dinklage in that mustache has committed a crime against fashion.

If I had that mustache, I'd want to kill a quarter of humanity too.

    The standout character of the past is Evan Peter's Quicksilver. He plays only a short role in the movie but leaves such an impression and has such cool powers, you have to wonder why the protagonists leave him behind. Superspeed is presented as so useful, you think they'd want to keep him around to make sure the world doesn't end. Yes, he has an annoying attitude but that's what you get when you're a teenager with superpowers.

    The continuity-welding between the First Class portion of the franchise and the original movies is well-done. You can see how Fassbender's Magneto transformed into Ian McKellens' and how James Mcavoy's Charles Xavier turned into Patrick Stewart's. Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique was always dissonant with the near-emotionless assassin played by Rebecca Romjin but manages to become a unique character in her own right.

The Sentinels are about as well-designed as I imagined they could be. A good compromise between function and iconic imagery.

    A part of me feels "iffy" about a touchy-feely Mystique when she's one of the meanest femme fatales in the Marvel Universe but this one was raised by/with Charles Xavier so that's bound to leave a mark. Besides, it was inevitable Jennifer Lawrence's "It" girl status would bleed into the movies and lead to an expanded role. She looks far more confidant playing Mystique this time around and I loved several of her "outfits."

    The Sentinels, villains we've been waiting to see in the franchise from the beginning, have only a limited role in the past section of the story. Thankfully, we get more than our share of robot-bashing action in the future part of the story but I prefer the retro-looking Sentinels to the modern ones. I also give kudos to the movie for showing that Magneto is not just a bunch of powers but is just as much a genius as Charles Xavier.

    The relationships are really the heart of the movie and while I question Beast serving as Charles Xavier's butler in the 1970s for years or the latter being devastated by the Vietnam war drafting his students (no insult intended to those who were), I really liked the way everyone was portrayed. Magneto and Charles' relationship has continued to disintegrate but there's still an underscore of respect. Raven has started to question Magneto's choice in methodology, not quite hitting the Stormtrooper fanaticism she has in X-men 1&2.

    Raven's respect for Charles hasn't completely evaporated either. Jennifer Lawrence really knocks it out of the park with her interpretation of the First Class Mystique.  Even though they have a short role to play, Ellen Page's Kitty and the rest of X-Force come off as good friends--something direly missing from the rest of the movies. There's also a moment where two versions of a character meet and it's awesome.

    I expect some fans will be divided by the ending but I think, as retcons go, it was earned. The whole "immutability of fate" concept is touched upon and I say 'boo' since there's no point to the story if nothing can be changed. It felt like a love letter to an exceptionally-long movie series and I'm glad Bryan Singer is back onboard.

    In conclusion, it's X-actly what the Professor ordered.

9/10

X-men: First Class review

    In anticipation of X-men: Days of Future Past, I thought I'd do a review of some of the previous entries in the series. One of the movies I have the most mixed feelings regarding is X-men: First Class. Produced by Bryan Singer and direted by Mathew Vaughn, it is the favorite movie of numerous X-men fans I know. On my end, I judge it to be the third best movie in the series after X-men and X-men 2. That, however, is damning with faint praise as the series dramatically declined with X-men: The Last Stand.

    Part of my general dislike of the film is the thing feels so damned gimmicky. It's like someone said, "You know what would be awesome? Let's combine X-men with Mad Men and see if that can get us out of the current rut we have with the series." The fact the movie works as well as it does given the X-men's traditional associations with Civil Rights, Magneto being perfectly positioned age-wise to be full of righteous anger but not completely set in his ways, and the fact the X-men were created in the 1960s anyway should allay this complaint. But it doesn't.

I love the return of the yellow uniforms.

    The movie is superficially aware of the Civil Rights era but prefers to pay superficial attention to it versus indulging the rampant chauvinism of the period. Part of the reason I never liked Mad Men was the show didn't condemn the nastier undercurrent of its setting but mourned it, singing about how it was awesome to be a privileged white male in the Sixties. I get the same feeling from X-men: First Class where the only mutants who prosper are, guess what, the privileged white male ones.

    The premise of X-men: First Class is that it's the 1960s and the world is very different. The Soviets are on the brink of nuclear war with the Americans, women are treated as objects, and the government is filled with ineffectual oversexed douchebags. Okay, things are sort-of different. Charles Xavier is the Old Money boy genius who dreams of a better world from his Ivory Tower while Eric Lensherr is a Holocaust survivor who dreams of revenge against the Nazi scientist who killed his mother.

    James McAvoy's Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender's Magneto are the only reason this movie works as well as it does. Well, almost the only reason, Kevin Bacon's Mister Sinister/Sebastian Shaw hybrid is a treat and easily amongst the best villains in the franchise. I can also never say anything bad about Jennifer Lawrence. Hollywood It Girl or not, she's never anything but entertaining and the only person who could have made femme fatale Mystique adorable.

    The problem is I'm not sure what the movie's message is and if there is one, whether the creators care about it or not. It's seemingly on the side of Magneto for most of the film but the movie draws an explicit parallel between him and Sebastian Shaw (who is a Nazi). Charles Xavier is shown to be idealistic and a good man but ultimately ineffectual.

    Even if the movie is trying to show both men as flawed, it does a poor job of saying what it thinks. Stuff happens in the movie and that's about the height of the movie's opinion, which is sad because the Civil Rights Era and the X-men have both had a very firm opinion about acceptance. I.e. it's a good thing.

    The sexism in the movie is off-putting too. The villains in the film are the Hellfire Club so some element of sex was to be expected (after all, its female members dress in lingerie) but the attitude of the film is dismissive to its female characters. Rose Byrne's Moira McTaggert is an almost an afterthought to the film while Zoe Kravitz's Angel goes from sympathetic to vile in two beats. Even Mystique is questionable as her growth as a person is symbolized by her trading one older male parent/lover figure for another.

    In conclusion, I think X-men: First Class is very entertaining. The acting is wonderful, the action is delightful, and it occasionally stumbles across something profound. Unfortunately, the movie's lack of desire to take a firm stance on the struggle for acceptance sours the whole thing for me. I'm also uncomfortable with the treatment of women in the film, which seems to be all about the (male) fanservice in a rather degrading manner. Still, it's worth a watch.

    Unlike X-men: The Last Stand.

7/10

The Wolverine review

    The Wolverine is a better movie than it has any right to be. After X-men: The Last Stand, the franchise has been on a downward spiral. X-men: First Class was entertaining but a thoroughly flawed movie elevated by gimmicks as much as the writing. Was I remotely interested in a sequel to X-men: Origins: Wolverine? No, I can't say I was. Even if I was one of the few who didn't hate it, I certainly didn't love it. As a result, I didn't enter this movie expecting much and thus was pleasantly surprised.

    So is The Wolverine good? Yeah, sort of. Above average and extremely so! Mediocre is an entirely pleasing way! Maybe I'm impressed with the results due to my lowered expectations but it's a pretty decent adaptation of Frank Miller's Wolverine comics (back when Frank was about ninjas rather than hookers). There's actual character development, emotions, and storytelling.

    Perhaps the part I enjoyed best about this movie is it's a sequel to X-men: The Last Stand that justifies the existence of said movie. A large part of The Wolverine is the titular character dealing with the fallout from Jean Grey's death. Having someone have a semi-realistic reaction to the traumatic events of X-men 3 was so unexpected, I was inclined to give the movie a pretty long rope to hang itself.

    And it didn't.

    There is nothing I hated in The Wolverine. Indeed, there's much I loved. There's Wolverine fighting ninjas. There's Wolverine fighting a giant robot. There's Wolverine, uh, umm fighting ninjas! He fights some Yakuza too, on a bullet-train! Now if he'd fought a dragon, this would be the best movie ever but I suppose they have to save something for the sequel.

At one point, Wolverine fights ninjas. This, automatically, makes it better than its predecessor.

    The premise is Logan, still mentally screwed-up by the events of X-men 3, has retreated into the wilderness as he is so prone to doing in the comics. Contacted by a billionaire technology magnate he saved during WW2, Logan is made an offer of mortality. Thankfully, this doesn't go in the direction you'd expect and when Wolverine does start losing his powers it's for a less cliche reason than Connor Macleod-esque angst. It's still pretty cliche but Wolverine is too much of a fighter to want to die.

    The stand-out character of this movie is Rila Fukushima's Yukio, a character I didn't care much for in the comics but who is transformed into a living anime heroine here. Given the X-men are all about translating animated characters into real-life, I was surprisingly okay with this. She's a fun psychic katana-wielding schoolgirl in a setting where that's entirely normal.

    Tao Okamoto's Mariko is bland but gorgeous, which is true to the source material.

Wolverine also fights a giant robot. This is enough to make the movie tolerable.

    Jackman, himself, is capable of playing Wolverine well. God knows, he should be able to after half-a-dozen films. He doesn't exactly break new ground as Wolverine in this film but he manages to display more emotion than he's been required to do since X-men 2. I still think he's the best choice for the character and while he may be overexposed, there's a reason kids like Wolverine. He's the only mutant whose power is a bunch of knives and getting up after getting his ass kicked, which is the definition of cool to a seven-to-fourteen-year-old.

    The movies villains are nothing to write home about but I'll give them props for managing to incorporate a giant robot, Viper, and the Silver Samurai. Mostly, the first. The movie's Viper has more in common with Poison Ivy meets Toad than Madame Hydra but she's serviceable as an insane sex pot psychopath (which is Viper's personality, if not background). The person I thought was the Silver Samurai wasn't, which was disappointing, but William Yun Lee did excellent for what little screen time he had--a common problem in superhero movies.

It says something about comic book fans my biggest complaint about Viper is her hair isn't green.

    So, overall, it exceeded my expectations but didn't blow me away. Maybe that’s a really bad standard to hold the film to but given the way the ball has been dropped with the Fox Marvel franchises lately–it’s nice to see them holding onto it. It makes me semi-excited to see Peter Dinklage unleash a horde of Nazi skyscraper-sized robots on our genetically abberant (but better for the diversity) species. In other words, bring on X-men 4 (or 7, depending on how you count Origins and First Class)!

7.5/10