Frankly, I found this movie—while entertaining, and certainly well-made—a bit…bratty.
Look, I realize that I’m about the only person on Earth who liked X3—though I’m still inclined to just forget about most of Origins: Wolverine, just from apathy—but this film just felt like an exercise for the director to throw away as much as he could, good or bad, from any of the films he didn’t helm.* With a few grudging concessions towards elements that were clearly done better outside his grip.
…Like Mystique being more than a naked blue murderer with no lines—oh, well, uh, that’s because the character we first met is all tragic and fallen and morally compromised by killing!** Magneto doing more with his powers than levitate a couple of tons of aluminum, some pistols, and iron filings? Oh, well, um—Golden Gate Bridge nothin’, he’s going to drop a stadium on the White House! And capture Richard Nixon! And threaten to publicly execute him with the old gun trick!
But mostly back to Singer-basics…for a work that’s a bit dreary, portentous, albeit sure as hell more respectful to the source material than a two-hour dayglo toy commercial.
And one that shaves down Storm and Cyclops’ parts down to two lines or less. The most important part.
*Because, y’know, he’d skipped town to make a quarter-billion dollar love letter to Richard Donner.
**She’d get a pass on the killing if she had metal claws, smoked a cigar, and a reverse-psychobilly haircut.
…okay, that part doesn’t really work as snark, granted, as that actually would be kind of awesome.
At that point Mystique was publicly a hero (presumably on camera, but at least in front of some very influential people) for risking her life to save the president. That changed the zeitgeist from “mutants are villains and we need robots to control them” to “mutants can be villains or heros, so we can control the villain-mutants with hero-mutants”.
I’m not certain which feat is more impressive; stealing a stadium or rerouting the Golden Gate Bridge. Either way, this guy all by himself is arguably a nuclear power.
Vaguely annoying they didn’t get Ray Park (or someone who looked like him) for early Toad.
I’m trying to figure out how Kitty’s time travel power worked from her point of view. I realize that I’m probably over-thinking this, but it’s bothering me.
Every time she sends someone back in time, it re-writes history from the time that the person was sent back to to the present. In the new timeline, Kitty didn’t send the person back - no reason to, the timeline was changed. And the person whose mind was sent back is the only person who remembers the original timeline.
Which means that from Kitty’s point of view, every time she sends someone back is the first time she has ever done so, since doing so re-writes history and she isn’t immune to the effect like the person being sent back is. It’s also the last thing she ever does, since the timeline is immediately re-written.
If that’s the case, then I really wonder how she knows she can do this. If every time she uses the power is the first time she ever uses it, how does she know how it works?
Okay, I generally enjoyed the movie, but did have a few issues.
First, I had not seen X-Men First Class, but caught it on cable. I really liked that movie, I thought it was excellent, with my one quibble being how Mystique becomes so evil later from such humble beginnings. But her motivations make a lot of sense.
(Okay, two quibbles, the other being how she’s always naked, even as a 10 year old girl when she first meets Charles. And how she looks when she’s naked, but that’s another thread topic.)
Anyway, the craziness of the future is one thing, but what jumped out at me was the technology level presented for the seventies. They have hovering robots that can target mutants from normal humans, and they’re not made with any metal. Um, no. They couldn’t have made those Sentinels in the '70s with metal, nevermind without.
I also wasn’t fond of the JFK connection, and the “curving bullet path” comments. There’s nothing magical in the bullet path that hit JFK and Governor Connelly. And despite what anyone says, the bullet is not pristine. It’s deformed from a side impact, which occurred when the bullet tumbled, which has been demonstrated in ballistics tests as a practical certainty to occur with those bullets.
Also, in the big battle in the future, I kept wondering why they waited so long to attack the incoming Sentinel ships. As soon as they were detected, couldn’t Storm and Magneto have gone to work on them? Yes, Storm eventually gets going, but I would have thought she could have started earlier.
Also, I don’t follow the comics - that can be good and bad. I don’t know who people are (Quicksilver, they never said that name, and when Logan mentions he knows somebody, I had no clue who), but I’m also not bugged by things not matching the comics.
Also, it’s been a while since I’ve seen all the movies, so I don’t always remember everything. When Stryker was twitching on the floor from the taser, I didn’t know why Wolverine was freaking out. They had to explain it to me.
Yeah, that scene was epic. It was odd they didn’t take him along for all the later antics, but the downside of impressive powers is to make them beatable later.
That’s my complaint, too. I mean, as much as I like seeing Jennifer Lawrence only wearing blue paint, it raises all sorts of other questions.
Besides the aforementioned lack of a butthole and nipples, she also apparently doesn’t have any lady bits. So I guess she doesn’t need clothes, because she doesn’t have nipples and labia, right?
It seems much more logical she’d wear “clothing” even in her blue form. Acceptance of her natural state doesn’t mean she still can’t be caught up in a nudity taboo.
Then why did he need to infuse the metal at all? Just reprogram them to respond to his commands.
Okay, so she gets shot, and Magneto drags her around by the bullet because she doesn’t expel the bullet, and finally Magneto pulls it out. She spends the rest of the movie limping around. Wait, if she can morph her body, shouldn’t she be able to heal her injuries?
Yeah, agreed.
I was worried about that until Mystique was shown standing up to Magneto. Subsequently they arrested Trask for selling military secrets. Hmmm.
Maybe we only saw her using her power in those extreme situations where she was intentionally trying to rewrite history. Perhaps there were other occasions when she used her power for more trivial reasons that didn’t rewrite history (“I’m going to send your mind back into the past so you can see where I left my car keys.”) and she remembers those times.
I’m still kinda curious about the effects Mystique (disguised as Wolverine) suffers when her “claws” are sliced off in the first film. She screams, but appears otherwise unaffected.
She was a little too unstoppable for my taste. I was vaguely hoping she’d run into some Special Forces brawler who could at least challenge her or land a punch, even.
I agree, it seems like the sort of thing they threw in after having heard something about “magic bullet” theory without having actually researched it at all. Especially since the whole idea of the “curving bullet” was that the bullet magically curved after it hit Kennedy but before it hit Governor Connelly (diagram), which wouldn’t make sense for Magneto to have done if he was trying to save JFK.
As for Mystique, I guess the answer could be - if she was wearing clothes in her “normal” blue form, those clothes would still exist whenever she morphed into anyone else (and that the clothes she shows when she morphs are actually her own body). But I agree that I’d prefer if she just wear some normal clothes and they just handwave it away (or show her ripping them off/slipping it off really quickly if they felt they couldn’t do that) since it just feels weird for her to be walking around buck naked all the time.
I was going to respond similarly to Andrew, but then I thought it out. It still creates a paradox. Let’s say Kitty Pryde sends me back an hour to find her car keys. I find them, hand them to her and…what? Wait an hour and do it all over again? Seems to me I’d get stuck in a perpetual loop of fetching those car keys just to make sure Kitty sends me back. If they had Kitty’s mind go back as well, it’d work.
Right, and in that new timeline, Kitty would never need to send anyone back. The only way it’d work is if Kitty went back with the person, so that her memories of sending someone would remain. But that’s not the way they did it, obviously.
But couldn’t the person she sent back tell her exactly what happened? After a few times, she would know how it works, even if she does not recollect her actually doing it.
No no no, she doesn’t wear normal clothes, the “clothes” she wears in her blue form are just as much affectations as the ones in her morphed forms. They’d just be a nod to human taboo conventions. Like I said, maybe she wears the scales that way and in fact she does have those lady bits she’s just covering them with blue body suit. Right?
No, she sends him back, he* sees *where she puts the keys, then he wakes up and tells her where they are. No need to hand her her keys before she lost them, just tell her where to find them now.
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As for Mystique, I guess the answer could be - if she was wearing clothes in her “normal” blue form, those clothes would still exist whenever she morphed into anyone else (and that the clothes she shows when she morphs are actually her own body). But I agree that I’d prefer if she just wear some normal clothes and they just handwave it away (or show her ripping them off/slipping it off really quickly if they felt they couldn’t do that) since it just feels weird for her to be walking around buck naked all the time.
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As much as the real reason for all of this is fanservice, in-universe it is practical for the character. She could have an outfit to wear when not morphed into anyone else, but she’d have to keep changing into and out of it and find some way to carry it around while she’s disguised as someone else. X-Men:First Class spent quite some time on her character development about shedding her need to do impractical things to try to look normal, so it’s in character as well.
Well, that still means she hasn’t ever done it, just been told about it.
I’m not sure there’s a “waking up” - just a “you get sent into the past permanently”. But then, Wolverine seems to have woken up well before the timeframe of the “future” in movie, but well after the “past” in the movie. I dunno - it’s a little sloppy, but I can overlook it.
Am I the only who thought when Nixon ran out of the bunker, “That CAN’T be the Prez because NO way would Tricky Dick leap in front of a “gun” to save someone else!”?
How many people realize the fan service has been greatly reduced in this movie? Jennifer Lawrence was wearing a full bodysuit in this movie. In previous movies, Lawrence and Rebecca Romijn’s costume was a combination of a partial bodysuit with paint.
