On films and mutant thingies!

[theweaselking]

Day Of Future Past did not disappoint. Reasonably paced, coherently plotted, consistently entertaining, doesn't contain any especially blatant pants-on-head-stupid parts. My only real complaint can be summed up as "a Nixon says what?" which I'm sure you will also see when you get to it, and does not ruin the movie.

As superhero movies go, it is by far the best X-Men movie, it is easily the best non-Marvel-Studios superhero movie ever made, and it is comparable to several of Marvel's own movies. This is high praise.

(Oh, and in the process it fixes most of the stupid parts of the previous, terrible X-Men movies. And it does so in a consistent in-world way, which is nice.)

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also there is an entire mutant whose power is "now you're thinking with portals"

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Blink as appearing in the movie is possibly the character who is best ever suited to cinematic interpretation.

[nadriel.livejournal.com]

It did feel a bit like Bryan Singer going "Yoink, I'll have my franchise back now kthxbye", In a good way.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

And there's a metacommentary: "If we keep going on as we did with all those crap movies, we will utterly destroy this world and 'X-Men' in a title will become something like 'written and directed by Uwe Boll' or 'based on the novel by L Ron Hubbard' as box office poison. In order to prevent this we must eliminate many of the events in several previous movies."

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

X-Men is Marvel, not DC. Am confused.

[kjn]

The X-Men (and I believe the Fantastic Four) movies aren't made by Marvel Studios, but by another movie studio under a license from Marvel.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"Marvel Studios" is Marvel's in-house movie making crew. They made the Avengers movies - Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Guardians Of The Galaxy, etc.

Marvel Studios makes good movies.

They sold the movie rights for X-Men to 20th Century Fox a long time ago, before Marvel Studios existed, because they were nearly bankrupt and 20th Century Fox wasn't. 20th Century Fox are not Marvel Studios, and have only just now apparently figured out how to make a superhero movie that is actually really good. They are the only non-Marvel-Studios studio to have done so.

But the fact that TCF owns the rights to X-Men is why you never even see a reference to mutants in any of the Avengers movies - Marvel Studios doesn't own X-Men. And it's why you'll never see a reference to the Avengers in an X-Men movie, despite Wolverine, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch being classic Avengers.

Marvel sold Spider-Man to Sony, which is why all the recent Spider-Man movies have sucked (Sony doesn't know how to make a superhero movie) and why Spider-Man will never, ever interact with or even mention The Avengers, Wolverine, SHIELD, or The Fantastic Four, despite all of them being people he works with regularly in the comics.


It's not as simple as Marvel vs DC, in the movies. Marvel's sold different characters to different studios, and kept some themselves, and while I'm sure they're regretting selling off the X-Men and Spider-Man *now*, at the time they didn't have a studio, didn't have a grand plan, didn't have a track record of making good movies, and didn't have enough money to stay in business if they didn't sell some movie rights.


[1] especially on terms where the movie rights only revert if the purchaser stops using them for a long time, which is why there will be a new shitty Spider-Man movie every two years, forever. Sony will never give Spider-Man back voluntarily, not when they can coast on Marvel's "hew, Marvel movies are pretty good"? vibe and keep making a profit until lightning strikes and they manage a good Spider-Man movie.

[skington.livejournal.com]

What, not even Spiderman 2? (The Toby Maguire one.)

[torrain.livejournal.com]

2004 is no longer recent.

See also: holy fuck I'm getting old.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: The first two Spiderman movies were decent - they hired a nerd who loved comics and knew how to make movies (Raimi) to make a comic movie, and it worked well as a classic example of Superhero Movies From Before They Figured Out How To Make Superhero Movies. They were perfectly adequate, for the time.

#2: Those aren't "recent".

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

I'd quibble with Wolverine being a Classic Avengers member, since he was added at the start of the Bendis-era. Not that the Bendis-era isn't several decades old at this point. Which, fuck I'm old and all...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch are themselves a pretty interesting kettle of rights, because they really are classic Avengers *and* classic Mutants.

And what's happened is that they were sold to TCF *as mutants*, but not *as Avengers*. TCF can use them (and did - Quicksilver appears in Days Of Future Past) but can't mention The Avengers or any of their history with Iron Man or Doctor Strange or anything like that.

In the mean time, Marvel Studios can use them (and did: Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch will appear in Age Of Ultron) but can't mention that their power comes from being Mutants, or that their father is Magneto, or anything about them ever working with any of the other Mutants.

[prk.livejournal.com]

SPOILERS:


I'm a bit 'meh' about the "then he woke up and it was all a dream" ending.

I mean, sure, it's a classic comic reset, but why invest time and energy in that world (not to mention angst at all the death scenes) when it's just going to reset and be meaningless?

prk.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Because all the time and energy of the latest movie was specifically invested in the hope that Logan could wake up and the whole horrible wrong-bad timeline would be just a dream.

(Given the mess that was Last Stand and the slightly less egregious but still embarrassing mess that was First Class, I am 100% behind this rewrite. 110%, when you count in the fact that Charles actually acknowledged he was being a spoilt controlling brat.)

[prk.livejournal.com]

I think Jim C Hines summed it up a better than I in http://jimhines.livejournal.com/736235.html in particular:

"Gratuitous X-Death: I get that the future is ugly, but I have very little interest in watching heroes get slaughtered in various gruesome ways. Yes, the fact that some of these mutants don’t look human means you can rip them in half or crush their heads underfoot and still keep your PG-13 rating. But what was the point? We all know those deaths are going to be reset anyway. It felt pointless and gratuitous."

That's pretty much exactly how I felt about it.

He also adds:

"Professor X and Magneto: I’ve enjoyed the relationship between these two over the course of the franchise. But while I enjoyed what we saw of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, I found the younger Erik and Charles to be rather meh. There was nothing new to their relationship, nothing we hadn’t seen before."

and

"Mystique: For the past ten years, Charles has been a grieving drug addict. (Perhaps not a literal addict, but that’s definitely how the movie was portraying him and his arc.) Erik has been locked away for trying to save JFK and managing to deflect the bullet right into the president instead. Smooth move, there. Meanwhile, Mystique has been running around, saving mutants, gathering info, and kicking ass. And the goal of the movie is to stop her? Topping things off, I’ll quote Jenn Reese here:

Despite the fact that the movie is literally about her decision to kill a man or not, the entire story is built around Charles Xavier anyway and framed as his decision to let her decide.

Short version: this movie needed less Charles-angst and more Mystique."

both of which I agree with, but it's that first point which really left me rather 'bleh'.

prk.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. With regards to the second point, I really felt it was about Mystique, and her choice, and was really pleased with that; I think that was one of the first things I said to theweaselking when we walked out of the theatre. Charles was basically there to relay the message and to be on probation as not-a-controlling-asshole and when he did that, he was a decent secondary character.

(With, admittedly, a line about bad acid that made me crack up.)

With regards to the first point: I disagree about the gratuity of the violence; I think the point is to establish that the situation as it exists is horrible, and untenable, and that horrible deaths is an effective way to do that. I will grant cheap, but I will argue gratuitous.

I do think it was heavier than anyone would reasonably expect for a PG-13 movie. I will note that up until this moment, I had not considered the movie's rating in the slightest. (I'm not saying people shouldn't consider it! I'm saying that I haven't had to look at movie ratings in years, only notice in passing that a movie has an R rating if I notice that it has (1) a red-band trailer that (2) I am seeing right now, and then promptly forget it.)

So going in as someone who was completely oblivious of the movie's rating and had gone in expecting to see a movie that was going to establish "this is the horrible genocidal future", I was unsurprised ETA: and felt it was doing exactly what I expected in the visual language of the genre.

I would have been happy with another or a different attempt to establish it, but I understand why they didn't go with that.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Except it wasn't "he woke up and it was all a dream", it was "in the end, he is the only survivor from a horrible future that was averted". "It was all a dream" is the cop-out negation of the previous events - changing the past you came from is the goal of time travel, and it's the victory condition.

At the end of Back To The Future, Marty wakes up to discover that all the bad things that happened to him and his family have been undone by his changing 1955. That doesn't make the bad things about 1985 "meaningless". Same thing here: You spend your investment in the future at least in part as a way of showing the horrors they need to alter.

I see your argument, but I disagree, and I think calling it "it was all a dream" is unfair.

(Would you at least agree that it's the best X-Men movie ever, and the best non-Marvel-Studios superhero movie ever?)

[prk.livejournal.com]

See my reply to torrain re the "it was all a dream" blehness I felt.

Honestly, I liked the first X-Men movie better than this one.

If I were to pick the best non-Marvel-Studios superhero movie, if I couldn't have V for Vendetta or Watchmen then the two to pick from that immediately spring to mind are the first X-Men movie, and the first (Toby McGuire) Spiderman movie.

As a point of reference, I'm not a comics reader, so while I usually enjoy the origin stories, I often find the sequels a bit disappointing. Marvel seem to be doing a better job with this for my tastes though. While I didn't enjoy the Ironman sequels as much as the first, I did the Thor & Captain America sequels.

prk.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

Well, since I missed several of the recent X-Men movies, I'm happy to hear about this retconning stuff anyway.