Cinemutants - X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2014, it’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) into the past to save their future from mutant-killing Sentinel robots. In 1973, Wolverine has to bring together a despondent Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and the incarcerated Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of the Sentinels.

1. Securing our future. We can argue about whether this is the best X-Men movie (it’s easily top three), but there’s no debating the fact that this is the most X-Men movie. Two casts, parallel timelines, ready-made comics inspiration, and a continuity fix that only muddles the waters even further: Days of Future Past has everything an X-fan could want. While the change-the-past plot was intended to smooth over any errors in the timeline (or, at least, provide a plausible excuse for them), it only exposes the gossamer of the plot to brutal scrutiny. By the end of the film, just how much of the past has Logan undone? (Director Bryan Singer is at least erasing The Last Stand, but there’s a wink toward expunging X-Men Origins: Wolverine, as well.) You might still need a chart to understand how all the films relate to each other, but I’ll argue next week that, as far as time travel and continuity are concerned, Days walked so Deadpool could run.
2. Infinite outcomes. Along with being the apex X-Men movie, Days of Future Past provides something so unique that only the superhero genre can do. As incredible as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan were, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender were equally inspired casting choices. And in virtually any other genre, you’d never have an opportunity to put them on-screen together; imagine a Godfather movie that saw Marlon Brando meet Robert De Niro, or a James Bond movie where Daniel Craig teams up with Pierce Brosnan. Another way Days cues up Deadpool is by implying that both versions exist out there somewhere, simultaneously; future films followed both Professors Xavier, and it’s inconceivable that Deadpool & Wolverine won’t see other iterations (or “variants,” in MCU-speak) of recognizable characters. Let’s hope the new castings are just as good. 
3. It all starts with her. In the comics, Kitty Pryde is the one traveling back in time to warn the X-Men about averting the future; here, though, it’s got to be Wolverine, both for the practical needs of the plot and for the fact that Hugh Jackman continues to be an audience favorite for his literal embodiment of the character. (The movie finds a creative way to keep Kitty relevant to the plot.) Meanwhile, the target of the future remains unchanged; it’s still Mystique, played by Jennifer Lawrence at the peak of her rising stardom. Two years after her Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and a year before finishing her tenure in The Hunger Games, Lawrence makes a third-stringer background villain into a compelling and deeply human protagonist. It’s almost hard not to root for her, though Lawrence’s apparent fatigue with the role will become inescapable in the weeks to come. (A third woman, Anna Paquin’s Rogue, becomes an axis point in the “Rogue Cut,” which sees Rogue freed from a mutant prison to help Kitty Pryde save Wolverine.)
4. In the future, do I make it? It feels like it’s been true for most of these movies, but Days of Future Past really illuminates the paradox of accurately and lovingly bringing characters to life and then giving them absolutely nothing to do. Bishop and Blink, for example, look like they stepped straight out of a comic book, but I’d be darned to tell you why, on the strength of this movie, any fan would care about them. Even Storm suffers from this paradox; as cool as it is to see Halle Berry rocking the closest thing to a mohawk we got from her, Storm’s presence in the film is barely consequential, and the film seems not to have noticed that she is essentially the last surviving faculty member at the Xavier Academy. The X-Men might have the deepest bench in comics, but the movies always seemed to focus on the same dozen or so; next week, we’ll see Deadpool do right by Colossus, who’s had less personality than window dressing in these films.
5. Is the future truly set? Superhero storytelling is perpetually stuck in the second act; after you get through the first-act origin tales, most of these stories never truly end. (And when they do, like All-Star Superman or Old Man Logan, they’re in alternate realities.) Days of Future Past eats its cake and has it too by giving Logan a cheery send-off while also holding open the door for more stories in the First Class timeline. (Quite where Logan takes place, we’ll consider in a few weeks.) But it does seem a little suspicious – and possibly even sinister – that Bryan Singer’s happy ending seems to erase/retcon only the movies he didn’t direct. Of the beleaguered director’s many sins, this is far from the worst, but this film does seem to promise a new golden age that, more or less, never came to pass. Did the film that was meant to fix the franchise actually break it? The best films to come are the ones that play fastest and loosest with continuity...

Sound off in the comments, true believers: where does Days of Future Past sit in your estimations, and was it really ten years ago already? Up next, second chances all around when Ryan Reynolds gets another shot at the Merc with a Mouth in Deadpool.

Cinemutants - X2: X-Men United (2003)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2003, it’s X2: X-Men United. After a mutant attempt on the president’s life, the X-Men are scattered when Col. William Stryker (Brian Cox) leads a raid on the Xavier mansion. Logan (Hugh Jackman) leads a group of kids to safety while Professor X (Patrick Stewart) seeks answers from his imprisoned friend Magneto (Ian McKellen). Meanwhile, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) tracks the mutant assassin (Alan Cumming), even as her powers begin to overwhelm her...

1. Empire state of mind. You can take a few different tacks with a sequel, but X2 wears its influence on its sleeve when it comes to The Empire Strikes Back. Like Empire, X2 lets the villains win in the first act, separates our heroes for their own journeys, and then reconvenes the cast for a life-and-death third act. It’s also like its sci-fi forerunner in that it’s arguably better than its predecessor, but while you could make a reasonable case for Star Wars over Empire, it’s hard to say X2 isn’t an improvement in nearly every way from the already-strong X-Men. As immediate sequels go, X2 is in fantastic company, setting the bar in a way that nearly every second MCU installment (Winter Soldier aside) misses.
2. We’re not as alone as you think. The X-Men comics have one of the deepest benches of characters, with so many distinctive faces and abilities across what was then forty years of storytelling. A standout feature of the comics has always been their delightfully soapy quality, with long-running storylines that feel at times more like daytime television. X2 continues the masterful juggling act from the first film and adds in the likes of Colossus, Nightcrawler, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and (after a fashion) Mastermind, with expanded roles for Iceman and Mystique. Surprisingly, the film never quite plays favorites; while some performances are stronger than others, there’s an incredibly balanced approach to the disparate plot threads. (Excepting, I think, Colossus, though his inclusion feels a bit like living scenery for the mansion. We’ll see him get his due in surprising fashion in a few weeks.)
3. The war has begun. While Ian McKellen is pretty safely the best villain the X-Franchise has ever had, Brian Cox is a very close second as William Stryker. In the seminal comic God Loves, Man Kills, Stryker was a televangelist with a rabid anti-mutant agenda; here, he’s the military scientist attempting to exterminate mutantkind, with the added backstory of being the architect of the project that turned Wolverine into Weapon X. Stryker will end up being a subplot that weaves through nearly all of the X-films (often unsuccessfully, as Wolverine’s mysterious origins tend to disappoint the more we tug on that thread). But when you want to anchor a franchise to Hugh Jackman’s performance, it’s helpful to have Brian Cox’s quiet menace lurking in the background, pulling the strings while McKellen gets to have all the snarling, snarky fun befitting a Shakespearean actor of his stature.
4. Have you tried not being a mutant? While everyone’s suddenly upset of late that the X-Men “went woke” (which incoming comics editor Tom Brevoort recently and smartly dismissed as a meaningless "infinitely adaptable scarlet letter" these days), those of us who have been paying attention know that the X-Men have always had a progressive bent, with mutants standing in as a sliding signifier for any tyrannized minority. Stan Lee occasionally claimed not to have intended the subtext, but it’s hard not to read the series without seeing any myriad of political controversies at play. At roughly the same time that Grant Morrison was exploring mutants as queer allegory, X2 is overt with its gay reading of mutants; Bobby Drake’s conversation with his parents reads inescapably like a “coming out” scene, replete with his mother’s tone-deaf “Have you tried not being a mutant?” At every turn, mutants are persecuted, hunted, and enslaved, and X2 is unflinching in allying itself with the oppressed.
5. Something bad is supposed to happen. If X2 is the franchise’s Empire moment, the good guys can’t win outright at the end; Magneto gets away, with an X-recruit in tow, and the whole thing concludes with an invocation of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” arguably the comics’ most iconic and expansive storyline. In it, Jean Grey succumbs to her repressed powers, becoming a cosmic force of unspeakable strength and annihilating an entire solar system. Nearly all of us knew that the first time Jean’s powers malfunction, X2 was promising that the Phoenix was going to rise. It’s tremendously confident to tease the Phoenix in the film’s final frames (a moment that might probably be a post-credits scene today), but we’ll see that the Phoenix often becomes the franchise’s Everest summit, tempting to approach but perilous to scale. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is X2 still one of the best superhero sequels ever made? Or has it aged poorly in the wake of its paler imitators? Join us next week for X-Men: The Last Stand (and it very nearly was).

Cinemutants - X-Men (2000)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

First up, from 2000, it’s X-Men. Caught in a war between Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and the villainous Magneto (Ian McKellen), Logan (Hugh Jackman) joins the side of the X-Men, a group of mutants dedicated to saving a world that fears and hates them. Meanwhile, Marie (Anna Paquin) discovers her own unique abilities before joining Professor Xavier’s academy. 

1. One hundred minutes and counting. I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count, but I was floored this time to realize/remember that the film is under two hours long. At 01:44, X-Men is incredibly lean and astonishingly well-paced. Some of the expositional dialogue is a little didactic, but the bevy of (uncredited) screenwriters balance a cast of no fewer than ten named mutants with a plot that forces all of them together fairly swiftly. Whatever Marvel does next with the mutants, it’s hard to imagine the storytelling being as efficient and economical as it is here.
2. What a cast of characters. Last time I did one of these, I mused that Raiders of the Lost Ark had one of the all-time best casts in movie history. X-Men, quietly, might also be in that running. From their first scene together, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen positively crackle, and I’d even argue that the whole thing succeeds on their lofty pedigrees. The rest of the mutants are no slouch; Hugh Jackman might be a foot too tall for Wolverine, but he’s got the attitude and the walk. This time out, I was impressed by James Marsden as Cyclops, playing the unenviable straight man but nailing the boy-scout leadership that makes the comics character such a stalwart soldier. Even Bruce Davison as the smarmy Senator Kelly feels uncomfortably prescient in his role as a fear-mongering politician.
3. Evolution leaps forward. Even back in 2000, I was aware that X-Men felt like a sea change in superhero cinema. It felt serious, but more importantly it was earnest – it didn’t treat the source material with suspicion or derision. Instead, it mined nearly forty years of rich storytelling for an equally pointed take on issues that have never really left us. Prejudice, political mobilization, and the kinship of found families: these elements have been present in X-Men comics since the beginning, and a one-two punch with Spider-Man two years solidified the new superhero milieu. Put another way, these movies walked so the MCU could run.
4. What would you prefer, yellow spandex? While X-Men taught us the virtues of treating the source material with reverence, the film had a little less patience for the superficial trappings of superhero comics. Having just gotten over the Day-Glo disaster that was Batman & Robin, perhaps moviegoers weren’t ready for comics-accurate costuming from the X-Men, who notoriously don’t always look like they all belong in the same book. The 1992 animated series crystallized the Jim Lee costumes for a generation, but the movies went for a more subdued black leather palette, leaning into the post-Matrix cool aesthetic. (The comics, as ever, would follow suit the next year, with Grant Morrison’s New X-Men positing a fashion-forward vision of mutantkind.) Having said that, the leather suits are perhaps trying a little too hard, but darned if they don’t look cool, and it’s no wonder that I hoarded the action figures (and still do).
5. The war is still coming. I remember sitting in a theater in 2000 feeling like everything had changed, but also that everything was just beginning. Part of the success of X-Men must have been its terrific ending, which cues up a number of really interesting ideas for the franchise to come. Best of all, unlike most superhero movies, it leaves its chief villain (and his shapeshifting lieutenant) alive for the sequel, and that image of Magneto jailed in a plastic prison is such a resplendent final tableau. We also get teases regarding Logan’s mysterious past and Rogue’s new life at the mansion, and we’ll see each of those blown into one of the best superhero sequels ever.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: where does X-Men fit into your superhero canon? And where does this one in particular land in your X-Rankings? Join us over the next twelve weeks; we’ll be back next time with X2: X-Men United.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

We’re eight movies into the X-Men film universe (nine if you count Deadpool, and hey, why not?), and while a fair number of critics are feeling X-fatigue, count me among the X-static – pun intended, because I’m happy about the way that the X-Men film franchise remains static in terms of its formula. With X-Men: Apocalypse, Bryan Singer is back for his fourth X-outing, a continued strong offering which introduces plenty of mutants, action, and character development to bode well as the franchise stands poised to move into double digits.

With Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) ushering his school for mutants into an era of peace, an ancient being known as Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) awakens in Cairo and gathers his four Horsemen – Magneto (Michael Fassbender) among them – to bring about the end of this world. While Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) works to protect the mutants from humanity, it’s up to the next generation of X-Men – Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – to save the world from the threat of Apocalypse.

With the continuity reconstructed in the wake of Days of Future Past, Singer is free to carve out a path toward the present day with access to the full range of X-characters, regardless of whether they live, die, love, or hate in the other films. There’s something liberating about not knowing precisely whether Magneto is on the side of good or evil in this one, a line which Fassbender embodies even without much dialogue to lean on. Ditto for the introduction of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean Grey, whose courtship (if one can call it that) is only just beginning; we don’t know if they’ll end up the squabbling starter-marriage from X-Men, but Turner and Sheridan are fun to watch and bring the characters to life with some very subtle yet comics-accurate hand gestures (Jean’s fingers on her temple, Scott’s dial-controlled visor).

And for all that X-Men: Apocalypse blusters on about the end of the world and the fate of mutantkind, it’s surprising that the film ends up being rather fun and incredibly human in its very personal scale. Like the Avengers movies, which have found great success in seeing its heroes out of costume, lounging about Stark Tower, X-Men: Apocalypse is at its most engaging when the X-Men recruit Nightcrawler for an impromptu trip to the mall as “a matter of national pride” (though an Avengers film might have showed said trip), or as Cyclops learns to master his abilities. It’s hard to say if there’s a real star in this film, because the X-Men are at their best when the ensemble cast is allowed to share the screen.

If this is the ensemble going forward, the more the better. While McAvoy, Fassbender, and Lawrence continue to powerhouse their way through the prequels, they’ve indicated they might not be back for a fourth outing together. It’d be a shame, to be sure, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the film continue to develop Storm and Jubilee, the latter of whom doesn’t get to display her powers just yet, and Singer’s recent tease that the next film will go to space is extremely promising for the wealth of source material on which he can draw. (Phoenix Redux, anyone?)

There have been some complaints about Apocalypse as an undercooked cliché of a villain, though I think that you need a colossal world-ending event to justify bringing together the X-Men, particularly after the last two prequels have dealt with less cosmic threats and more personal dangers (Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw, though looking to heat up the Cold War, was also a personal foil for Magneto). It is a shame to put an actor as talented as Oscar Isaac beneath all the prosthetics and makeup that go into Apocalypse, but Isaac acquits himself well with the villain’s ego and powers of persuasion. If you want a grounded superhero battle, Captain America: Civil War is still in theaters (and it holds up), but the X-Men demand something more fantastical.

To the heap of well-crafted, Singer-helmed X-titles, I have to add X-Men: Apocalypse, more fun than it promises and just as compelling as its predecessors. The final battle doesn’t leave much room for surprise (how many permutations of averted catastrophe are there?), but the road getting there is as good as anything we’ve seen yet. Singer proves himself the X-King; long may he reign.

X-Men: Apocalypse is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief strong language and some suggestive images.”

Monday at the Movies - August 17, 2015

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”  We haven’t done one of these since May, but it seems worth commenting on the “director’s cut” of X-Men: Days of Future Past, dubbed “The Rogue Cut” for reasons that will become apparent.

X-Men: Days of Future Past - The Rogue Cut (2014/2015) – I’m not doing a full review of The Rogue Cut, which adds about fifteen minutes of unseen footage, because my original sentiment still stands. I called the theatrical release “one of the better outings in the series,” and The Rogue Cut doesn’t change that. If anything, it makes the film a stronger one, filling in what I had perceived to be a stumble before the third act begins, the beat when Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) goes missing. Here, The Rogue Cut fills in the gap by 1) restoring Anna Paquin’s turn as Rogue in the dystopian future of the film, and 2) giving Mystique a wonderful moment with Beast (Nicholas Hoult) in 1973. While I concede that the theatrical cut isn’t less by omitting these sequences, the film is overall richer for having them. In fact, I got more of a sense that I was entering a world during The Rogue Cut, rather than the crossover event the theatrical release felt like. Although the changes are almost universally positive additions to Days of Future Past, I have a small complaint, which might not even be a negative. The Rogue Cut juxtaposes Magneto (Michael Fassbender) retrieving his helmet with Magneto (Ian McKellan) rescuing Rogue, and while I think the cross-cutting is a nifty formal trick, I can’t help but feel the former sequence was better served on its own, building more tension as we got inside the young Magneto’s head. But it’s a moment that only rings hollower if you’re familiar with the original incarnation, and everything else in The Rogue Cut is so well-crafted that it might now be my new favorite X-Men film. PS – Stay tuned for a new mid-credits sequence! (The original post-credits scene is still intact.)

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - August 6, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Nine of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week I’ll be covering the original X-Men trilogy.  (The prequels will be getting their own post further down the line.)

X-Men (2000) – In many ways, we comic book movie fans owe a lot to Bryan Singer, who demonstrated in this film that the genre was a viable one beyond the self-parody of the Schumacher era.  Singer wisely opts to throw viewers into the midst of the mythology without a lengthy origin sequence; we join Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Rogue (Anna Paquin) as they meet the X-Men, a group of powerful mutants led by Professor X (Patrick Stewart) in opposition to the evil Magneto (Ian McKellen).  Using Wolverine and Rogue as entry points is genius; diehard fans already love Wolverine, and newcomers will find Jackman one of the more engaging comics-to-film translations.  But the film is populated by fantastic actors – including Halle Berry, who doesn’t do much but does it well – and none are more brilliant than Stewart and McKellen, who as dueling foes are more Shakespeare than Stan Lee (who cameos, by the way – his first in a Marvel movie).  Even James Marsden, who’s usual more milquetoast than Patrick Wilson, proves a good fit as the stick-in-the-mud Cyclops.  As director, Singer does a great job making the soap opera source material accessible and streamlined without sacrificing the emotional complexity of the characters; there are hundreds of X-Men, but Singer picks the big ones and never loses sight of the fact that their interactions are more interesting than the giant machine Magneto builds for the surreal climax of the film.  Above all, this is a film that feels real, that winks not ironically but lovingly at its source material, acknowledging its depth without overloading its audience.

X2:  X-Men United (2003) – Singer proves the rule here with a comic book sequel that is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor (which, if you’ll recall, was no slouch).  Unfettered by the necessity to introduce the characters and their world, Singer dives headlong into the central problem of acceptance by pitting the X-Men against military bureaucrat William Stryker (Brian Cox), whose policy of indiscriminate mutant genocide unites heroes and villains.  Everything successful about the original stands here, as well, turned up to 11; the acting excels, from McKellen as caged animal Magneto to newcomer Cox, whose performance drips sadistic menace with each drawled consonant.  The cast of characters is beefed up a little, but never disproportionately beyond what the film can handle and never without significant narrative and thematic purpose; each addition deepens rather than overfills.  X2, perhaps more than its antecedent, operates on the level of metaphor, something I really want my superhero films to do.  Here the metaphor is on the nature of intolerance, which Singer carries off without being overbearing; in one standout scene, among my favorites in the trilogy, a mutant’s mother asks, “Have you tried not being a mutant?”  It’s an oddly quiet moment in a summer blockbuster, but it’s one that reminds us what’s at stake behind the flash of optic blasts and the snikt of razor claws.  Bonus points for its clever link with Stryker’s abuse of his own mutant son, which reminds us that bigotry isn’t a spectrum.  Even the previous film’s villain recognizes this, and McKellen’s nuanced return is a more than welcome one.

X-Men 3:  The Last Stand (2006) – When Singer stepped aside from his pet franchise to direct Superman Returns, Brett Ratner stepped in.  It’s a series of bad decisions that led to a pair of lackluster films (more on Superman Returns later), which is a shame because there are obvious moments where X-Men 3 is on the right track and other moments when it obviously goes awry.  The introduction of the “mutant cure” is in many ways a perfect end to a trilogy about what to do about heterogeneity, but Ratner seems to overcompensate for getting a shot at the X-Men toy box by cramming the film with scores of new characters who don’t do much at all.  (Ask yourself how many of their names you can remember.)  Worse, the film kills off some of the more interesting characters very early on, presumably to make room for the new faces, but for my money the film never really recovers from (spoiler warning) the death of Professor X.  The film trades in clichés, as when a military drill sergeant is played by R. Lee Ermey or when a character repeats, dead serious, the bromide about a woman scorned.  The climax is among the better action sequences in the trilogy, if only on a purely visceral level; Magneto’s manipulation of the Golden Gate Bridge is a brilliant visual, and the execution of the “fastball special” is as fun on film as it is on panel.  But the film fumbles so much before that point – and butchers the “Dark Phoenix” plotline almost beyond recognition – that X-Men 3 tries to be too much and ultimately never succeeds at being much at all.  The trilogy deserved better.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!