(no subject)

[deathpixie]

Behind a cut this time since I will be mentioning spoilers and I'm firmly of the belief this is a film that benefits from you not knowing what's going to happen. Like I said, it's not so much the movie itself I enjoyed, it's the thought processes it's engendered, and here are a few of them. Warning, I do like the sound of my own typing...

1. Character deaths: Scott's death.

While I can understand why Scott fans are unhappy with the way things were done, I can see how it works thematically. Like I said in my other post, I'm not such a canon fanatic that I expect movie adaptations to be exact (Lord of the Rings is a good example of how that can (mostly) work). Given the actor was involved in another project I can see why they needed to kill him off rather than just not use him - with the Dark Phoenix storyline, you had to do something about Scott not being there and death would be the only reason he wouldn't be. My objection would be to the cavalier way it was done and everyone else reacted - only Logan even asks about Scott's fate and there's no on-screen reaction from any of the people who were his family and friends.

1a. Charles' death.

This is the one that really worked, for me. I like the movieverse Charles, who tries so hard to be the St. Charles of the comics but comes off as so very human at times. "I don't have to explain myself to you" was a perfect summing up of the character, to me. It's not even that he's a bad man, per se, just one with a grand dream and the power to implement it in a world that's slowly grinding his fine ideals away. Every time he draws a line in the sand, something happens to force him to step over it and always for the most noble of reasons - to save a life, to stop a death. The fact that in X2 he 'froze' everyone in that museum for the sake of extricating three students from an awkward situation is a prime example of someone who's started blurring the lines and is finding it all too easy to continue to justify. His death, at the hands of his beloved student and first 'victim' (again, for her own good and the good of mankind, remember), raises him to sainthood, makes him a symbol, not a man. One could argue that if he hadn't died, where would he have stopped, which line would have been the final one he wouldn't cross - shades of Onslaught there and given the post-credit bit it's not entirely out of the picture.

I think I liked this Charles because it's a very shades of grey situation and we all know how I love those. *grins* An essay into the ends justifying the means, which is essentially what the X-Men themselves have been - who sets up a superpowered strike force in order to ensure world peace and harmony, hmm? ;)

1b. Jean's death.

The price of having a character become evil is that there's always consequences to the actions they perform whilst evil. X3's Phoenix, whilst not killing an entire planet of asparagas people did inflict some serious casualties, ones that essentially required the character to die. Comic Phoenix was able to eventually return as a character after a period of (punative) death because the asaparagas people were strangers, aliens from a distant world who the readers had never seen before. X3's Phoenix not only killed Scott and Charles, she slaughtered X amount of soldiers and depowered Brotherhood as a matter of course. For a character, it's extremely difficult to come back from that without falling into the old 'I was possessed by an outside agency and they made me do it!' excuse (sound familiar, any one? *g*). X3 actually avoided that old chestnut by having the Phoenix not only be part of Jean, but a part whose circumstances at least we're sympathetic to - imprisoned by Charles, released by Jean's 'death' at Alkali Lake, threatened with containment/extinction again - she's doing what any X-Man would do and fighting with everything she has. But by setting things up in such a way (and I have to say, it's the best Phoenix interpretation I've come across and it's one of my favourite story lines - [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] explored something similar in [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] without the massive death count) the writers put themselves in a corner. Jean had to die and in such a way there would be no doubt as to her death. To save Jean Grey, Phoenix had to die, and that's exactly what happened.

2. Phoenix as Nixie.

[Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] pointed out the water imagery surrounding Phoenix in her journal and I've been thinking about it further in light of some recent reading - Tad Williams in War of the Flowers describes nixies, water sprites who appear to be beautiful woman but then become ugly, alien monsters once you're in their element, with the all-black eyes and greenish tinged skin. Whilst the Phoenix is traditionally associated with fire, the emphasis on water works, given the way Jean died. Drowned by the dam breaking, laying at the bottom of the lake for X amount of time, only to resurface. The fact water is one of the most difficult elements to control with TK only highlights the Phoenix's power. The special effects used when Phoenix is using her powers makes sense in the nixie context - there's something decidedly drowned and dead about the way she looks. For a while there I was entertaining the thought that she was a reanimated corpse, using the life-force of Scott to jumpstart itself properly...

3. The cure.

Can I say I love the concept of the cure? Not for how it was enacted, although it was a nice touch using Leech, but for the potentialities. [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] had the truth of it when she said in another thread that she enjoys cure plots for the ethical and personal issues that arise and this one's a doozy. I'm tempted to start an XP meme asking people that if such an option was available, how would it affect their characters (if people think this'd be a good one, comment and I'll stick something up), because the wider repercussions are just too fascinating. A cure changes the mutant landscape, rocks it to its foundations, and has far wider-reaching consequences than just the personal, although I love that too.

Again, the nature of the cure is one of those 'ends justify the means' issues - the ethics of using a young boy's mutancy to remove the mutancy of others is a complicated one. Individuals with mutations detrimental to their lives and the lives of others (like Kevin Ford from the New Mutants line, I think it is - he has the ability to disintegrate organic matter with a touch and has no control over it) could be saved a lifetime of grief, but at what cost? As X3 showed, such a process easily lends itself to weaponisation and Magneto wasn't entirely wrong about anihiliation creeping up on you - human nature is such that fear will always be a powerful motivator and there's always a "just in case" scenario to justify things.

4. It's not all praise and puppies.

There's a few things that don't work with the film and I think my main argument would echo that of many others in saying that there's far too much in here. I can see why they went with combining Dark Phoenix with another plot - there needed to be something going on that would set up Jean a) being used as a weapon and b) coming into conflict with the X-Men - but using the cure plot was perhaps overly ambitious. The cure has enough threads in it to be a film in and of itself and having it compete with one of the classic X-Men storylines only detracted from it and relegated several central characters to symbols. Warren, for example, is the innocent victim of prejudice and fear, but who is he really, what were his experiences at the school and yes, how did he get across country in time to save his dad from going splat (although the opening scene in the bathroom was brilliant)? Leech is the means by which the cure exists but again, there's absolutely nothing there about him, who he is, what makes him tick. Hank is a bit more fleshed out (and a stunning performance by Kelsey Grammer is responsible for the fact he's not the empty shell a lot of the others are) but there's still so much more that could have be done - I would have liked to have seen a scene of him wrestling with his own issues re a cure and coming to a decision - it was a great storyline in the New X-Men books.

There's the usual argument of Halle Berry and her wooden acting, although I didn't hate her quite so much this time. Perhaps because the moments of truly awful dialogue made her delivery blend in. And Marie is being made into every whiny angsty Goth Sue you've ever come across in a bad fic or RP. Again, she suffered from lack of screentime - more about her experiences with the cure would have been appreciated (and can you sense a theme here? Cure fic, it has to happen!).

Essentially though, I enjoyed the movie. It's not Art, but neither is it the worst thing I've ever seen and I don't consider it a waste of money, time and brain to have gone and seen it in a theatre. Possibly because I had the cash at the time. ;)

Comments

[diamond-dust06.livejournal.com]

Do you read Ultimate X-Men? Movie!Charles resembles Ult!Charles very much in this respect. (Actually, about half of the movieverse comes from Ult, which people seem to forget when they start complaining about the inconsistencies with "canon." But using 616 as the sole basis for the movies would make the whole thing so complicated. Can you imagine bringing in the Shi'ar now and doing the whole Phoenix and Dark Phoenix sagas in a single film?)

[deathpixie]

I do indeed, and yes Ultimate Charles is definitely more my speed than 616 Charles. In fact, I prefer the Ultimateverse overall these days because it tends to be a bit more 'realistic' than the other. The Shi'ar being a big case in point. ;)