PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*
For many fans, X3 is the one where
20th-Century Fox’s X-Men franchise took its first
seriously wrong turn, and lost most of the mojo that had been
established with the first two films. But upon re-watching X2
recently, I get the sense that everything wrong with Bret Ratner’s
take on the mixed-up mutants rose organically out of what Bryan
Singer had wrought.
As I noted in my review of X2, one of
the biggest problems with the X-Men movies was that it proved
difficult for expensive movies, produced over the course of two or
more years, to follow the example charted by the Marvel comic book.
The comic, coming out once a month, could take full advantage of
using what might be termed a “shifting ensemble.” To misquote
Dorothy Gale, characters could “come and go quickly” in a monthly
comic. Yet at the same time, there was much more narrative space to
deal with the reasons for their coming and going, or even for their
switching from heroes to villains (or vice versa). Television
episodes are able to deal with similar developments, but as yet no
one has managed to handle shifting ensembles within the venue of
expensive feature films.
Consider, for instance, Singer’s
handling of Marvel’s character “Rogue.” Singer and his writers
opted to excise her complicated history, which was pretty much
inevitable. In place of her being a sassy Southern brawler, she
became more empathetic but lost any power to speak of. Rogue worked
well to add a layer of sensitivity in the first X-movie, which in
turn helped sell non-fans to the character of Wolverine. However, in
both X2 and X3 Rogue really has nothing to contribute except for some
soppy romance with the Iceman character. In essence, Singer used the
character for a particular effect in one movie, and then didn’t
have any way of integrating her within the serial concept.
In terms of plot, Singer also
foreshadowed one of the concerns of X3. By having Jean Grey perish at
the end of X2, X3 was constrained to follow up that thread. Wikipedia
acknowledges that Singer, before departing the X-franchise to chase
flying Kryptonians, roughed out a plot centering upon Jean’s
rebirth, one that would have partly involved the character of the
White Queen. Possibly, had Ratner and new writers Simon Wincberg and
Zak Penn chosen to focus on this idea, X3 would have been more
salutary.
Unfortunately one other concept went
into the script-mill. Joss Whedon was considered as a director for
the third film, and a continuity he wrote for Marvel, “the Cure,”
was duly optioned by Fox as a possible script-source. It would seem
that, rather than dispensing with the Cure plotline, Wincberg and
Penn chose to make that the “A plot” for X3, thus demoting the
resurrection of Jean Grey to a “B” plotline. Even admitting that
the writers try mightily to make the two concepts meld, the parts are
never more than parts, failing to cohere into a greater whole.
The philosophical question posed by the
Cure plotline is fairly rudimentary: on the level of “if you knew
you could live your life again without Problem X, would you do it?”
Purely in terms of the movie franchise, one might see as a rough
development from the quotable quote of X2: “Have you ever
considered not being a mutant?” In both Whedon’s comics-script
and the completed X3, a scientist invents an across-the-board cure
for the state of mutant-hood. Such a cure is tempting to those
mutants who are inconvenienced by their abilities, such as Rogue, who
can’t even touch her boyfriend without draining his energy and
imperiling his life.
In X3, the threat to the existence of
the mutant species incenses Magneto, prophet of “homo superior”
separatism, and he leads his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in a quest
to capture the source of the Cure—which, to further complicated
things, is a mutant with the ability to neutralize powers. The
Magneto-plotline was also all but inevitable considering that the
Brotherhood had played such major roles in the first two films, even
if one member, Mystique, was sidelined, while new members Callisto
and Juggernaut joined the gang. Still, the use of Magneto as a
dimestore Mephistopheles, tempting the reborn Jean Grey to use her
powers for selfish ends, comes off as nothing more than a failed
attempt to integrate the two plot-threads. In the end, the battle of
heroes and villains over access to the Cure is just another
Hitchcockian whatsis, and the audience has no real reason to care
about what the Cure means, or human-mutant relations, or much of
anything.
To cite yet another inevitability, it
was a given that the extremely involved underpinnings of Marvel’s
“Phoenix Saga” could never have been reproduced for a stand-alone
film. I give credit to the writers for trying to foreground Jean’s
rebirth in the nature of her mutant powers. The very reason she can
come back from her death in X2 stems from the fact that her
tremendous psychic abilities arise from the subconscious mind (a
shout-out to FORBIDDEN PLANET, perhaps?) Yet the scenes in which the
X-Men seek to grapple with their comrade’s return from death are
uninspired in the extreme. Apparently James Marsden was not available
for the full shoot, as Singer had co-opted his services for SUPERMAN
RETURNS, and so Wincberg and Penn were obliged to simply kill him
off, which event gets even less resonant treatment than the matter of
Jean’s resurrection. Because the Jackman version of Wolverine was
in love with Jean, he has to do the heavy lifting in the Jean Grey
B-plot, and the others are just not really that involved.
Storm gets more substantial usage here
than in the previous two films, and Iceman is better used than he was
in X2, but on the whole “characters come and go” with nearly no
setup as to why the audience should care about them. Versions of
Colossus, the Beast, Shadowcat and the Angel all appear on stage and
execute their parts, as if to please hardcore fans panting for their
inclusion. But precisely because the characters appear so
mechanically, Fox sacrificed any chance to make them viable parts of
the franchise. There are certainly some nice character-moments here
and there, particularly those between Jean and her mentor Professor
X, and some of the battle-scenes are good fun, if not especially
compelling. But again—a lot of nice individual parts don’t make
a good movie.
The best thing one can say about X3 is
probably that, even if it marked the start of the downward spiral,
it’s nowhere near the spiral’s bottom.
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