Det, MI X3

This is the weekend!

There are midnight showings scheduled Thursday night, but Blasty has a very early morning on Friday, so that's not going to work for us.

Right now I'm planning on going to AMC Forum 30 in Sterling Heights (it's my favorite). Blasty is going to be off Friday afternoon and barring a doctor appointment, it would be fun to see it on opening day!

The showtimes for Friday are:
X-Men: The Last Stand
Rated PG-13, 1 hr 44 min
Buy Tickets: 12:45, 4:00, 7:15, 10:30

So, anyone want to go??

 

Some of us are going after 7 at AMC.

 

Todd and I are going to try to go to the 8pm show at the Uptown Palladium in Birmingham. We really like this theatre and it's close to the grandparents, so we can drop the Bean off for a visit and have a night out If anyone wants to join us for this showing--the more the merrier!

 

Mike, you were right! I don't know X-Men canon, but that was not a good movie.

 

Did you all see the last scene after the credits? Important information was revealed at that time.

 

Thanks. When it comes to nerd things, especially the X-Men, I generally can be relied upon. Critics are half and half with their reviews, according to Rotten Tomatoes, and the local Net ninnies are all drooling over this garbage. It really saddens me to see all the insane fanboys who can't see past "OMG LIVE-ACTION FASTBALL SPECIALZ0RZ~!!1111" and the ignorant savages combine to try and say this movie was anything close to resembling something good.

 

You have to read Harry Knowles review. I didn't like the movie, but he hated it with a firey passion. I think you'd enjoy it.

 

For Cyclops haters, and I dare someone to refute this point...

SPOILERS
No two characters, other than Wolverine (and even then, he really has his own history), have personified the X-mythos more than Cyclops and Charles Xavier. To not only kill them off, but kill them off BEFORE THE HALFWAY POINT is a slap in the face of fans who have followed the X-Men for years.

And this wasn't even me writing it, but a fellow X-fan off of The-W.com, a wrestling-centric message board that nonetheless has other topics for conversation. Dislike how the writers neutered Cyclops in the movies, dislike the fact Xavier and Cyclops are authority figures and so your macho manliness must rebel against them, but Cyclops and Xavier are the X-Men.

 

Went and saw it last night...good movie, what can I say? I won't even get into arguing with Mike becuause if he actually saw the movie and read the comics, rather than just reading back story synopsis, then I could take his opinion seriously.

I liked the way the deaths were handled, and I liked the cure story line. The best part of the film is that Ratner didn't kill the series. Throughout the movie, story lines that were featured in the comics and original cartoon series were mentioned and the characters that (possibly?) died were given a foreshadowed return possibility.

I go to movies like X-men to be entertained. I go in with no expectations (except Star Wars). Bottom line, I was entertained and had fun with it. Judging by the weekends numbers, so did a lot of other people.

 

Dustin, I'm glad you enjoyed it, I wish I had! I was expecting it to be along the same lines as the first two films. In my opinion, it just didn't hold up in comparison. When someone can explain why it went from bright daylight to dead of night while they moved the bridge ... and why didn't they just throw that bald kid at Jean Grey, then maybe I can enjoy the movie.

Mike, I can refute that statement all day! I only know Cyclops from the films and the strange cartoon Blasty rented from Netflix. Cyclops has never impressed me: from his mutant power to his leadership skills (or lack thereof). I just don't like the character. What he may have been like in the comics shall remain a mystery to me because I just don't care enough to find out. I think if you're going to throw Wolverine out of the equation, (and I'm guessing you want the "good guys") then the most important characters are Xavier and Jean Grey (you know, until the lake incident). Next, I'd pick that Beast dude, he was fun.

The heart of the story is the differing philosophies of Xavier and Magneto and how they deal with what makes those with the X mutation different from humans. Everyone else, though entertaining, just moves things along.

 

I love the implication that I've never read a comic book in my life, yet I am also called the world's biggest nerd. An accusation that I agree with, yet both things about me can't be true. Either I'm the world's biggest shut-in nerd, or I have never read a X-Men comic book. Because, quite frankly, a nerd isn't a nerd without having read a comic book.

And for the record, YES I have read the X-Men comics, I LOVE the X-Men comics, and I know more about the X-universe than I do about the f'n European Union.

Susie, Cyclops is the field team leader for the X-Men. While Xavier is the overall head, Cyclops is the one who takes the X-Men off on their missions. His character has been completely neutered and womanized for the movies, so you are not seeing Cyclops. My anger at his role in X3 is more of the endpoint of a slow build of bitterness.

****, where to start... uh... PLOT? Ok, as a comic fan... you know the person that these films are made for... this film was f'n stupid. It takes the single best known story line from the series and condenses it down to a f'n minor sub-plot. Yeah, the Dark Phoenix Saga(DFS) is treated like an after thought in this film. It is tossed aside, and turned into a B-story. It's barely even that! The source material was the single best X-Men story to date. Any fan of the series knows it and few have disliked it. Why the f' would anyone with half a brain cell f' that up? Seriously... What the f' were these people thinking? Then they take another well known storyline, Cure, from the recent best selling X-Series ASTONISHING X-MEN... and f' it all to **** as well. 'Cure' had nothing to do with 'Worthington Industries'. It had nothing to do with Magneto losing his powers, no major characters died in it. What this "plot" felt like, was like having some guy off the street go into a comic book shop, randomly buy 5 X-Men comics and take those issues and devise a plot from them. And the actual directing is BEYOND horrible. The pacing of the movie has no rhyme or reason, it is god-awful. It feels like Ratner was just some **** off the street who needed a job. Anyway, now that you've got a story that f' up two perfectly good stories what do you do to show that you really ain't got **** and you need to cover for this... you throw in special effects. In fact, you throw in more effect shots then the first two films had COMBINED! That's what you do! Did Chuck Austen write this ****? That's all I can imagine, cause he's the only X-writer I can think of who completely ignores past stories and in fact makes it a point NOT to know or care what has happened before he takes over a comic book.

Well, the effects looked nice, but what was the f'n point? Why bring in Angel? What did he do that was so important to the storyline? Nothing, that's what, he had wings so it was something to take your mind off there being no storyline. This is also why they threw in so many other characters that went to waste like Callisto, Juggernaut, Colossus, Jubilee, Siryn, Psylocke, Omega Red... all of these characters had less then ten minutes of screen time. Filler for the lack of a coherent story. Wasted screen time and MY time. In the first two films, Singer threw in little things like Shadowcat running into the classroom and Colossus busting threw the wall and Gambit's name on the computer screen, but as I said, these were LITTLE thing for the comic geeks to cream over. Little things, that may get some kind of build later on. Here, those 'little things' turn to ****. It made no sense to waste all these characters just simply to have a big f'n fight scene, a fight made to take your mind off the fact that there wasn't much story. It was like the makers of the film were saying "Here look at the shiny object while I ass rape you for your money."

Halle Berry sucks. She can't f'n act her way out of a paper bag. She has two facial expressions and her voice comes out sounding like she's reading cue card and has bad eye sight. I can't f'n believe that she keeps asking for more screen tim

 

I understand that! I was responding to the quote you put up in the first place. The movies made it seem as though Jean was a lot more important than Cyclops from the beginning, which is where I was going. Geez, I guess I'm not a qualified enough geek to post!

You lose a certain amount of credulity when you throw so much ire against a film you haven't seen. I'm sure you wouldn't like the film, but until you actually see it, your opinion just sounds like a regurgitation of some other person's opinion.

An example: I can complain about the lack of quality in all the Harry Potter movies because I've read the books and seen the films: that would be my opinion. You don't hear me complaining about The DaVinci Code movie because I haven't seen it (I'll tell you my opinion of the book, though).

So, how about those Detroit Tigers? (note, this is called a topic changer, it?s intent is to diffuse a situation where no one is going to have their opinion changed and people will get angry ? it?s time to move on or close the thread.)

 

One last X3 critique, this time from InsidePulse and their "Contradicting Popular Opinion" columnist ML Kennedy. The highlights:

Everybody is a freaking mutant?

It seems to be the case in our X trilogy, that every super-being is a mutant. While the X-Men comics have always been mutant-centric, they have never been exclusively so. The films offer us no aliens, nor cyborgs, nor supersuits, nor mutated insects, no ninjas, no pirates, no government created mutant hunting over people, etc.

Even actively avoiding people's reactions to X3, one will still note the shared sense of, "HEY! Juggernaut is not a mutant!" This sentiment isn't limited to comic geeks either. That Fox channel Saturday morning X-Men cartoon holds a special place in the memories of many. When a 20 year old girl is talking about "X-Men", that cartoon is the basis of her knowledge of these things. She knows that Juggs is a magic-based super-being, and wonders why the filmmakers would use the Juggernaut character if they weren't going to use the Juggernaut character.

But I digress. Making every super-being a mutant serves to simplify the X-films in two ways.

A. It removes the need for origin stories. This reason is why Stan Lee started using mutants in the first place. We don't need any explanation for Storm's fantastic powers. She was born with them, or they developed during adolescence or whatever. She wasn't bitten by a radioactive sirocco. No origin stories means more efficient storytelling, though not necessarily better storytelling.

B. It separates things into simple Manichaean terms. Black or White, human or mutant. This thing lead us into the next topic: Mutants are pigeonholed!

The X-films depend on this discrete separation of mutants and humans. You are either dealing with **** Sapiens or **** Superior. But the thing is, this lessens the relevance of the films' allegories. The topics that X-Men films deal with tend towards more abstract constructs than exclusive categories.

It is tempting to see the world in the black and white terms of X-Men movies, but not appropriate. For instance, say we treat a segment in X-Men as a metaphor for race. Humans are discriminating against mutants, mutants are discriminating against humans, whatever. In the X-world there is no possibility for overlap. In real life, we got Tiger Woods. In reality, race is merely a set of characteristics which certain members of certain groups may match. You don't have just black people, white people, Asian people, etc. You have The Rock, you've got Lenny Kravitz, you have people that deny traditional categorization. We've got categories, sure, but there is overlap.

In real life, most of this social taxonomy exists as arbitrary constructions. The lines between races are mostly imaginary. The X-Men films deny this thing, validating a tenet of the causes which they profess to fight.

...

Am I the only one who would have liked one line of dialogue that mentioned how Hank McCoy changed from a normal looking Steve Bacic to a furry blue Kelsey Grammer between X2 and X3?

Although, if you want to get into it, let's see who has the Kitty. We've now had three movies and three different Kitty Prydes. Am I not supposed to notice this thing? We started with Sumela Kay, switched over to Katie Stuart, and now have Ellen Page. C'mon now. If the studio replaces Page with George Clooney for X4, I'll know something is up.

I mean, they kept the same Jubilee from the second to the third movie... Although she was different in the first. ****...What a waste...

Okay, so the story of X3 had Kitty being a pretty useful character. She uses her power in a clever way in an attempt to stop Juggernaut, she is eventually able to defeat Juggernaut, etc. But the script and the direction was reluctant to give her any sort of personality whatsoever. What a bland, nothing character. The same goes for Colossus who isn't even allowed to have his complex comic book personality of "large Russian." That same blandness i

 

I too am also a big X-men comic book fan for over 15ys now. I am glad that I am not the only one who thinks this movie sucked butt. It screwed with everything that the X-men are about. and the whole time Logan was messing with Magneto I was thinnking that a bad rip off of X-men #25oct Fatal Attraction "The Death of a dream" and Wolverine #75nov was going to happen.