that was a movie
Jun. 5th, 2016 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI saw X-Men: Apocalypse today.
It's the first X-Men movie that's ever felt soulless to me. There have been bad ones before (i.e. X3, about which the current movie makes a joke without apparently realizing that the same joke can apply to it), but never before one that seemed like Extruded Standard Movie Product. XMA has a lot of state of the art CGI and absolutely no feeling that the story it's telling is important. Even the worst of the previous X-Men movies had that sense of importance; they were all trying, however clumsily, to delve into the problem of what kind of choices we should make in a world full of oppression and unfair fights.
There's no ethical issue in XMA; not even Erik can give it one. His choice is entirely about his personal grief and rage; the movie does, I think by accident, touch on the uncomfortable question of how long being a Holocaust survivor can justify being, well, Erik, but Erik's response to the awful things that happen and have happened to him is so out of proportion that the movie erases ethical issues as soon as they arise.
The emptiness at the movie's heart is the main source of my overall meh reaction. There were also storytelling problems. The movie tries to do far too much, with a ton of new or "new" characters, a bunch of subplots, what looks very much like an attempt at set-up for a Dark Phoenix storyline (again), and ALL THE CGI, and the natural result is that nobody's story gets much development. It's telling to compare Nightcrawler in XMA with Nightcrawler in X2, for example, even thought I did find new!Nightcrawler kind of adorable. And why couldn't they do something with Quicksilver besides exactly the same thing they did in the last movie? Ororo was especially shortchanged, although to be fair, I was in the bathroom for part of her character introduction (I got back when Apocalypse shows up in her house), so maybe I missed something. Even Charles only got what felt like token development, with the totally unsurprising return of Moira McTaggert and the somewhat surprising, but cheesy, loss of his hair.
Erik got the most development; pity that it all happened in a different movie. It was pretty clear that the XMA script had to accommodate Fassbender's schedule, with the end result that most of his scenes were Fassbender + green screen or Fassbender + little-known actors whose schedules could be made to accommodate his. I will admit that I find it impossible to love an X-Men movie in which Charles and Erik barely speak to each other. The one scene where they were together had, astonishingly, no spark at all. And why can't Erik stay on at the school? There's no good plot reason for it, and it would be fantastic to see Erik trying to adapt to Charles's views. Alas, I think this lovely possibility was another victim of Fassbender's schedule, perhaps with some compulsory heterosexuality thrown in, since we're supposed to believe that Moira will leap at the chance to be with Charles again despite (a) not having seen him for twenty years, and (b) the fact that last time he mind-wiped her.
Still, one of the few good things I can say for the movie is that it did not entirely waste Fassbender. While I'm not thrilled at the obligatory fridging of the wife and moppet (and yeah, I know it's a comics reference), Fassbender's performance drew out every bit of emotional nuance possible from a scene like that. Plus we got the single manly tear of love for Charles, which was the highlight of the approximately 20 minutes of screentime take up by Erik hanging around in the sky destroying stuff; all the rest of that time it felt like Fassbender had been expressly prohibited from acting.
What I did like a lot was Mystique. I liked that she was doing something concrete about the oppression of individual mutants, and I loved that she had become a hero and an inspiration to young mutants worldwide. I wish the script hadn't thrown a lot of that away at the end, though, by turning her into the drill sergeant of the new, creepily militarized X-Men. It's not the X-Men I object to, but the militarization; I was uncomfortable with Mystique's "forget everything you know" speech (what values, exactly, does she want them to forget?) and with what felt, in that brief scene, like a "basic training" sort of approach designed to homogenize team members into a unit. In training scenes in earlier movies, the teamwork seemed to spring out of fostering individual gifts, not . . . regimenting them?
I seem to have come back to things I disliked. There were a fair few. But I did like Mystique getting to be the one people saw as a hero. There are several better potential movies inside XMA than the one we actually saw, and one of them is all about Mystique being awesome but also learning the limits of solo activism, and reluctantly deciding to come back and lead a team. Another is about Erik, minus the fridging plot, seeing his own distorted reflection in the bad guy and trying to come to grips with his trauma and rage and his instinct to smash the world to bits because it's so unjust, and maybe deciding to try things Charles's way for a while. (Yes, I really want a movie where Erik is a teacher at the school.) And there's the one about Charles and Jean, where they both worry about her power and have to decide whether suppressing it might not actually be a good idea.
Unfortunately, the franchise seems to be moving away from character-driven stories in favor of lots of computer-generated buildings collapsing, computer-generatedly.
It's the first X-Men movie that's ever felt soulless to me. There have been bad ones before (i.e. X3, about which the current movie makes a joke without apparently realizing that the same joke can apply to it), but never before one that seemed like Extruded Standard Movie Product. XMA has a lot of state of the art CGI and absolutely no feeling that the story it's telling is important. Even the worst of the previous X-Men movies had that sense of importance; they were all trying, however clumsily, to delve into the problem of what kind of choices we should make in a world full of oppression and unfair fights.
There's no ethical issue in XMA; not even Erik can give it one. His choice is entirely about his personal grief and rage; the movie does, I think by accident, touch on the uncomfortable question of how long being a Holocaust survivor can justify being, well, Erik, but Erik's response to the awful things that happen and have happened to him is so out of proportion that the movie erases ethical issues as soon as they arise.
The emptiness at the movie's heart is the main source of my overall meh reaction. There were also storytelling problems. The movie tries to do far too much, with a ton of new or "new" characters, a bunch of subplots, what looks very much like an attempt at set-up for a Dark Phoenix storyline (again), and ALL THE CGI, and the natural result is that nobody's story gets much development. It's telling to compare Nightcrawler in XMA with Nightcrawler in X2, for example, even thought I did find new!Nightcrawler kind of adorable. And why couldn't they do something with Quicksilver besides exactly the same thing they did in the last movie? Ororo was especially shortchanged, although to be fair, I was in the bathroom for part of her character introduction (I got back when Apocalypse shows up in her house), so maybe I missed something. Even Charles only got what felt like token development, with the totally unsurprising return of Moira McTaggert and the somewhat surprising, but cheesy, loss of his hair.
Erik got the most development; pity that it all happened in a different movie. It was pretty clear that the XMA script had to accommodate Fassbender's schedule, with the end result that most of his scenes were Fassbender + green screen or Fassbender + little-known actors whose schedules could be made to accommodate his. I will admit that I find it impossible to love an X-Men movie in which Charles and Erik barely speak to each other. The one scene where they were together had, astonishingly, no spark at all. And why can't Erik stay on at the school? There's no good plot reason for it, and it would be fantastic to see Erik trying to adapt to Charles's views. Alas, I think this lovely possibility was another victim of Fassbender's schedule, perhaps with some compulsory heterosexuality thrown in, since we're supposed to believe that Moira will leap at the chance to be with Charles again despite (a) not having seen him for twenty years, and (b) the fact that last time he mind-wiped her.
Still, one of the few good things I can say for the movie is that it did not entirely waste Fassbender. While I'm not thrilled at the obligatory fridging of the wife and moppet (and yeah, I know it's a comics reference), Fassbender's performance drew out every bit of emotional nuance possible from a scene like that. Plus we got the single manly tear of love for Charles, which was the highlight of the approximately 20 minutes of screentime take up by Erik hanging around in the sky destroying stuff; all the rest of that time it felt like Fassbender had been expressly prohibited from acting.
What I did like a lot was Mystique. I liked that she was doing something concrete about the oppression of individual mutants, and I loved that she had become a hero and an inspiration to young mutants worldwide. I wish the script hadn't thrown a lot of that away at the end, though, by turning her into the drill sergeant of the new, creepily militarized X-Men. It's not the X-Men I object to, but the militarization; I was uncomfortable with Mystique's "forget everything you know" speech (what values, exactly, does she want them to forget?) and with what felt, in that brief scene, like a "basic training" sort of approach designed to homogenize team members into a unit. In training scenes in earlier movies, the teamwork seemed to spring out of fostering individual gifts, not . . . regimenting them?
I seem to have come back to things I disliked. There were a fair few. But I did like Mystique getting to be the one people saw as a hero. There are several better potential movies inside XMA than the one we actually saw, and one of them is all about Mystique being awesome but also learning the limits of solo activism, and reluctantly deciding to come back and lead a team. Another is about Erik, minus the fridging plot, seeing his own distorted reflection in the bad guy and trying to come to grips with his trauma and rage and his instinct to smash the world to bits because it's so unjust, and maybe deciding to try things Charles's way for a while. (Yes, I really want a movie where Erik is a teacher at the school.) And there's the one about Charles and Jean, where they both worry about her power and have to decide whether suppressing it might not actually be a good idea.
Unfortunately, the franchise seems to be moving away from character-driven stories in favor of lots of computer-generated buildings collapsing, computer-generatedly.
