X3 is "On Notice"

Warning - this is generally a tirade against the movie X3. If you haven't seen it, be forewarned that I talk about the plot a lot in order to make my case for why this movie was a huge disappointment to me. That being said...

I should start out with a few disclaimers. One, I will freely admit that I am a superhero fan, and I have been since I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I loved reading comics and watching the Saturday morning cartoon versions of these superheros. My favorites were always X-Men, Spiderman and Batman.

So I've been pretty excited in recent years when these stories have made it to the big screen (Batman Begins, despite its flaws, was a brilliant return to what the original was all about and not the campy (while amusing) Batman of movies such as Batman Forever and Batman & Robin). I loved the first two Spiderman and X-Men movies, and in both cases I thought the second was actually better than the first. I'm still eagerly awaiting the third Spiderman film, though with my X3 experience I'm a little more wary now. I mean, really, there's enough material there to last beyond two movies, right?

Apparently not! What made the first two movies work so well was their faithfulness to the comics. I say this not just as a fan of the original comics, but also because those comics were so wildly popular for a reason - they were good stories. So I wasn't surprised with the popularity of the first two X-Men and Spiderman movies given their faithfulness (with a few notable and necessary exceptions) to the comic book stories, characters, etc.

The sad thing about X3 is that apparently they decided there really weren't any interesting things left to tell from the comics, so they took the characters, some semblance of a plotline from the original stories and then just threw them into this great new story in which they all show off their powers a lot for the sake of special effects.



--warning: spoilers start here--



I realize that the X-stories are hard to tell in film form because there are five million characters, but killing off Cyclops after he's had about 2 minutes of screen time was ridiculous. Given, the movie version of the character has kind of sucked anyway, but to just brush right past his death was kind of crazy. Especially to have Jean kill him because she "doesn't know her power as the Phoenix."

I understand they couldn't use the original Phoenix saga - aliens blah blah blah - would have been way to complicated. But this one was a sore disappointment. And I think my real complaint was that the plot was almost suffering from a split personality: they were trying to tell this story about Jean, which only worked moderately well, as she spent most of the movie just looking angry and standing there silently, and the story about Magneto. I don't really understand why Magneto recruited Jean, given that for all her "awesome power" (apparently her powers now include the ability to just rip things apart with her mind) she mainly just stood there.

I won't even get into the ridiculous death of Professor X, the mutant "cure" being used to turn Mystique and later Magneto into an ordinary human (ridiculous!) or the horrible final abuse of Rogue's character. These things just make me upset.

Just to end on a positive note, I will give them credit for a few things that made me smile/laugh (other than the terrible dialogue). Seeing Bobby finally turn into a fully-blown Iceman did my childhood heart well, that was a lot of fun. And having Beast around in the final battle scene, complete with Churchill quotes felt more like the story I remembered. I also appreciated seeing the "Danger Room" in action, complete with Sentinel, and Colossus of course rocks.

Now I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed for Superman Returns (the trailer looks great!) even if Superman was never my favorite superhero, and wait anxiously for Spiderman3.