X-Men

With the future release of X-Men Days of Future Past I thought I would take this opportunity to take a look at the X-Men film franchise from Fox as a whole. Before I get into my thoughts and opinions on the franchise I would just like to note that I am a huge Marvel fan and was raised with X-Men comics as bedtime stories, but with this being said the more Fox produces this franchise the less I like it. The thing that made the X-Men and Marvel heroes so unique when they were first being written was that they did not have a perfect life, they experienced real life problems. So to make a successful Marvel movie you cannot just focus on the superhero part of it, you have to develop the characters and make them relatable. This leads into one of my biggest problems with the original trilogy and that was the casting. Some of the casting was great such as Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Shawn Ashmore as Iceman, Halle Berry as Storm, and even Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde. However this fantastic casting is ruined by poor choices for key characters to the X-Men such as Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, James Marsden as Scott Summers, and my lest favorite Anna Paquin and Rouge. 

(For a break down of any of the characters mention in this post feel free to click here to be brought to the Marvel Universe wiki, specifically the section pertaining to characters in theses films)

Of course this dislike in the casting could be partially related to my own personal feelings but I do feel that these three characters were wrongly cast. First you have Famke Janssen as Jean Grey who she portrays as a whinny "poor me" character that I see no appeal in, which does not help the story line of Cyclops and Wolverine fighting over her. Yes, Jean Grey is a character who experiences struggles from her powers, however they should have cast someone who could have portrayed those struggles in a way where the viewer feels sorry for her, instead of just annoyed. Second you have James Marsden as Cyclops who is portrayed as a jealous whinny team leader. The character rarely ever shows any strength or leadership. Also his whole story line through the trilogy essentially just wrote him off to make room for Wolverine. Finally you have Anna Paquin playing Rouge who to me has always been a strong independent southern bell, but in the trilogy she is portrayed as another helpless whinny character. Of course I do understand it is not just the actors who affected the characters but also the director and script, however I still strongly feel that they were cast all wrong.

Another problem I have found with this franchise is that it has always been about Wolverine, which is understandable in a marketing and business sense, however as a fan it is frustrating to see Fox maintain the rights to the X-Men and just use such a unique team to carry one character. With all of the success Marvel has been having lately with their films it would be amazing if the rights to the X-Men reverted to Marvel and they rebooted the series. But that was all just a rant that has been building for some time, and that is not what this is about, we are suppose to be looking at the next film in the series “Days of Future Past”.

Now I do not expect them to stick with the original story line, although with the previews of sentinals and the focus on Kitty Pryde in Last Stand I assume that they will be basing the story on that. We have seen this with X-Men First Class, where they essentially just used the name from the comic series and wrote a completely different story. The Premise of Days of Future Past in the original 2 part comic series was that in a dystopian alternative future mutants are incarcerated in internment camps after the assassination of Senator Kelly by Mystique and the brotherhood. A future Kitty Pryde transfers her mind into her younger self and then tries to get the X-Men to stop the assassination and stop this future from ever happening. The X-Men eventually succeed and change the course of their timeline, however the original future still exists but in an alternate dimension. Now this story line could fit perfectly with the trilogy, however they are saying that this film will act as both a prequel and a sequel to the trilogy and First Class. 

This is what confuses me the most, because there are so many contradictions between First Class and the trilogy that I have no idea how they will tie the two together. Obviously they have a plan in mind for this and probably have for some time now, but other then calling them different dimensions and trying to bring the two together I have no idea how they could logically say that First Class actually leads into the trilogy. Some of these inconsistencies include:

• ·         At the end of First Class, we see the incident that paralyzes Professor X from the waist down. Mind you, this movie takes place in the 60s. In the movie, The Last Stand, the opening scene shows Professor X walking, which is set to be 80s.

• ·         In the same opening scene in The Last Stand, Xavier and Magneto are still friends. In First Class, they have already went their separate ways.

• ·         In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we also see Professor X standing at the end of the film.

• ·         Back to the Wolverine movie, during the escape of Three Mile Island, we see Emma Frost as a teenager. In First Class (which happens years before), she is an adult. Of course, they never mentioned her name in the movie, but the actress was credited as "Emma Frost."

• ·         In the first X-Men movie, Xavier states that his first meeting with Magneto was when they were teenagers. In First Class, they are grown men the first time they meet.

• ·         In X2, we see Beast in human form. In First Class, we see him transform from human to blue mutant. Unless he was able to transform himself back to human, and decided to turn himself blue again in The Last Stand, that just wouldn't make any sense.

• ·         First Class establishes that Hank McCoy (Beast) was the one who built Cerebro. In the first movie, Professor X explains that he built it with the help of Magneto.

• ·         Because it was stated that Magneto helped Professor X construct Cerebro, Magneto was able to build a helmet that was impervious to telepathy. While in First Class, Magneto merely takes the helmet from Sebastian Shaw.

• ·         In First Class, during the scene when Xavier uses Cerebro for the first time, we see a young Storm cameo. That would mean Storm in the trilogy should be about 50 years old. I'm sure this was made clearly for fan service, but I'm just sayin'.

• ·         In The Last Stand, Mystique becomes cured from her mutation, where we see her revert into a brunette. In First Class, she's a blonde. First Class also establishes that her blue form is her "true" form, which means she was born blue. If being "cured" in The Last Stand means she gains a human appearance, I'm going to assume that she had normal skin before her blueish scales. So which one came first?

• ·         Moira Mactaggert seems to look about the same age in both First Class and The Last Stand, which is set decades apart.

She looks good for a 30 year difference

Of course for things like Xavier walking and beast being blue or not one could say that this has happened in the comics plenty of times, but the comics have had 50 plus years of story lines, we are only going into our fifth X-Men movie, it would be ridiculous if this is how they planned to explain it from the beginning. And there are some more inconsistencies and who knows, maybe Days of Future Past will find the perfect way to meld the two together and I will look like an idiot, it wouldn't be the first time.

I could honestly go on and on about this film franchise and talk about how I wish Marvel could receive their rights back to their characters so we could watch one big Marvel Universe develop, oh and don’t even get me started on Spider-man.

Since I did not actually review these films I will not be giving them a rating however I will finish with this. I do generally enjoy the X-Men movies, although the casting, story lines and inconsistencies do bother me as an X-Men fan. Out of all of the X-Men movies my lest favorite by far is First Class just because it is such a mess of the X-Men story-line  I enjoyed both Wolverine Origins and the new Wolverine although I am not sure how I feel about his claws being cut and the Silver Samurai in general. As for Spider-man which I just mentioned, he is my favorite superhero, and watching the original three movies hurts. I understand that it brought popularity to the Superhero film genre however it was such a misrepresentation of Peter Parker and Spider-man, also why Toby Maquire....... The most recent Spider-man however was a big step forward.

That’s it, I’m sorry, I’ll stop

Chris