cowboy_witch (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cowboy_witch) wrote,@ 2009-05-13 11:32:00 |
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Another Movie Review
To quote Harmony: "Ugh! Just ... ugh!"
I grew up with the X-Men. More specifically, I grew up with Wolverine. Sure, he wasn't the nicest character Marvel ever churned out, but dammit, he was awesome. His attitude, his powers, his mysterious past that was slowly leaked out to the fans over the course of a couple decades -- culminating with 2001's Origin -- there was little Wolverine could do that would rub his fans the wrong way.
Which was why each of the three X-Men films were right to focus on him. Other characters were perhaps more important in the grand scheme of things, but Wolverine was by far the most popular character -- which made him a no-brainer for the first X-Men Origins film. But if this is the way they're all gonna be? Scrap all the other ones right now and don't even bother.
Where to start with this one ... let me say that I knew going in there would be some changes, a few liberties taken with the backstory for the sake of the film. I understood that, and I was fine with it -- each X-Men film did the same thing, and they all wound up being very good movies (yes, I was even okay with how they changed the Phoenix storyline in the third film). But Wolverine didn't just change a few things. It bastardized nearly the entire legend.
Setting up Wolverine and Sabretooth (Victor Creed -- played by Liev Schreiber, that guy with the big nose who was in Defiance) as brothers didn't bother me ... mostly because Origin hinted as such. The film paid far too little attention to Logan's childhood in 1800s Canada, though (it actually could've been its own movie). A lot of what eventually made Wolverine who he was happened in the Canadian wilderness when he was still a child. We see almost none of that.
And as for the slow-motion montage with the credits, showing Logan and Creed fighting for the U.S. in every war known to man (even though they were both Canadian) -- Watchmen, much?!
I came to grips back in X2 with the changes made to the character of William Stryker. Stryker was actually a televangelist in the comic books (appearing in the God Loves, Man Kills story arc), hellbent on ridding the world of the sin that was mutants. For movie purposes, he was a military officer who eventually turned his attention to experimenting on and trying to control mutants after watching his mutant son kill his wife. That's fine -- the change worked well in X2.
Here? Not so much. The character was too erratic in his deeds and actions, and I just couldn't get behind the guy playing him (Danny Huston). What, we couldn't get Brian Cox to reprise the role and just give him some of that young-looking CGI stuff we fed Xavier and Magneto at the beginning of X3? He wanted the part. For someone who apparently figured so prominently in Wolverine's past, Stryker came off flat.
Speaking of characters ... there are far too many in this movie. A lot of the characters promoted in the previews turned out to be nothing more than glorified cameos, and most of those were mere bastardizations of said characters. Consider:
Emma Frost ... in the comics, she is the deadly White Queen, a character who in recent years has gone from one of the X-Men's mightiest foes to one of their leaders (and Cyclops' girlfriend, for some reason). She's also British. You see none of that in this film, nor do you see her use her telepathic powers. All you see is that diamond skin thing she's got going on, and she's just some scared teenager. A scared American teenager. FAIL.
Kayla Silverfox ... in the comics, she was one of Wolverine's many lovers, and someone who was given accelerated healing by the Weapon X project (in the movie, she can convince people to do things by touching them). This is all well and good, but the movie also tries to tell us she's Emma's sister. FAIL #1. The movie also fails to tell us who the hell she is before her first "death." I had a hard time feeling for the character or her relationship with Logan when I spent much of the film wondering who she was. FAIL #2.
John Wraith (will.i.am) ... a teleporter who once worked alongside Logan in Stryker's military missions. This is a case of a lot of potential going to waste; Wraith really doesn't amount to anything more than an informant for Logan -- who predictably meets his demise around the middle of the movie. Chalk this one up to there being too many characters.
The Blob is also a casualty of this flaw -- not to mention the character isn't the product of an eating disorder. I originally thought his real name, Fred Dukes, was wrong, but apparently over the years, Marvel finally gave the character a real name. Again, nothing more than an informant along the way and a complete butcher job on one of the franchise's longest-standing characters.
Agent Zero had his purpose -- Stryker's right-hand man, one of Logan's early antagonists -- but what the hell was Bradley (Dominic Monaghan)? Oh, look, he can turn on light bulbs! Most. Pointless. X-Men. Character. Ever.
Now to the biggest offenders: Cyclops and Gambit. Now, I like Cyclops as a character, but why is he in this movie?! Scott Summers' past has nothing to do with Weapon X or Wolverine. He was never kidnapped in a school in Ohio by Sabretooth; Summers spent his childhood in a Nebraska orphanage unknowingly undergoing experiments from a character we would later know as Mister Sinister (hell, that could be its own movie). Though it was cool at the end how Xavier came in to save Scott and the other mutants, Cyclops' appearance in this movie was contrived and forced.
Gambit, a character I never liked, finally weaseled his way into an X-Men film, and he picked the worst possible one to do it. As far as I can remember, Gambit never had anything to do with the Weapon X project, yet here he is in this film, talking about being one of Stryker's prisoners at "the island." His screen time is minimal when compared to the pre-film publicity the character received, and he feels nothing if not convenient.
Oh, and this island? I figured, considering how the movie butchered almost everything else, this would be Genosha -- the island mutant sanctuary from the comics. Nope -- it's Three Mile Island. As in the nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. That's right -- somewhere along the line Stryker moved his operation from Alkali Lake in Canada (the correct and original location) to an abandoned nuclear plant.
Am I the only one who sees the potential disaster in that?
Anyway, one last character to get into before I talk about the few good things about Wolverine. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) was a treat, especially once one discovered he was Stryker's latest Weapon X creation. This one, the creators got right -- for the most part. For one, Deadpool could still talk once he underwent the change in the comics, and he wasn't some puppet for Stryker, either. He was still the wise-cracking smartass who could kill 20 people with automatic weapons and not break a sweat.
He also didn't have all those powers. He had the healing, he had the adamantium implants, but he could neither teleport nor shoot beams from his eyes.
Still, that fight scene with Deadpool, Sabretooth and Logan was easily the highlight of the film. Excellent sequence, really. The scene in which Logan finally receives his adamantium was also a powerful and well-done moment in the film, but the sad truth is ... such moments were too few and far between. For every moment I sat with a geeky grin on my face, I had another 10 moments of head-scratching and asking myself "What the fuck ...?"
The film claims that adamantium is an indestructible metal derived from a meteorite Stryker found in Nigeria. While such an explanation worked in Smallville -- because Kryptonite was actually a part of the fallen planet Krypton -- this explanation in Wolverine is a slap in the face to the fans. Adamantium wasn't a derivative of something from space; it was a man-made alloy.
Hugh Jackman was great as Logan -- no surprise there. Problem was, there wasn't all that much for him to work with. X-Men Origins: Wolverine suffers from a lack of identity, betraying too much of the original tale and trying to force so many characters into the film that anyone not named Wolverine, Sabretooth or Stryker can't get a word in edgewise.
The film also loses a lot of focus as a result.
A sequel is rumored to be in the works, a story that would detail Logan's time in Japan. While that stands as one of Wolverine's best stories (written by X-Men legend Chris Claremont and drawn by 300 and Sin City czar Frank Miller), I'm worried about that adaptation after watching this film. The forthcoming Magneto and Deadpool films also worry me, because I'm afraid the same creative team will smear their greasy fingerprints all over those, as well.
I might've liked this movie more had I not already known the majority of Wolverine's backstory, but as it was, this film was inaccurate, cluttered and some of the special effects looked awful cheap for a film that took over $140 million to create. The X-Men trilogy set the bar high, but rather than go for the pole vault, X-Men Origins: Wolverine decided to play limbo.
Do what I'm going to do next week: go see Star Trek instead.
To quote Harmony: "Ugh! Just ... ugh!"
I grew up with the X-Men. More specifically, I grew up with Wolverine. Sure, he wasn't the nicest character Marvel ever churned out, but dammit, he was awesome. His attitude, his powers, his mysterious past that was slowly leaked out to the fans over the course of a couple decades -- culminating with 2001's Origin -- there was little Wolverine could do that would rub his fans the wrong way.
Which was why each of the three X-Men films were right to focus on him. Other characters were perhaps more important in the grand scheme of things, but Wolverine was by far the most popular character -- which made him a no-brainer for the first X-Men Origins film. But if this is the way they're all gonna be? Scrap all the other ones right now and don't even bother.
Where to start with this one ... let me say that I knew going in there would be some changes, a few liberties taken with the backstory for the sake of the film. I understood that, and I was fine with it -- each X-Men film did the same thing, and they all wound up being very good movies (yes, I was even okay with how they changed the Phoenix storyline in the third film). But Wolverine didn't just change a few things. It bastardized nearly the entire legend.
Setting up Wolverine and Sabretooth (Victor Creed -- played by Liev Schreiber, that guy with the big nose who was in Defiance) as brothers didn't bother me ... mostly because Origin hinted as such. The film paid far too little attention to Logan's childhood in 1800s Canada, though (it actually could've been its own movie). A lot of what eventually made Wolverine who he was happened in the Canadian wilderness when he was still a child. We see almost none of that.
And as for the slow-motion montage with the credits, showing Logan and Creed fighting for the U.S. in every war known to man (even though they were both Canadian) -- Watchmen, much?!
I came to grips back in X2 with the changes made to the character of William Stryker. Stryker was actually a televangelist in the comic books (appearing in the God Loves, Man Kills story arc), hellbent on ridding the world of the sin that was mutants. For movie purposes, he was a military officer who eventually turned his attention to experimenting on and trying to control mutants after watching his mutant son kill his wife. That's fine -- the change worked well in X2.
Here? Not so much. The character was too erratic in his deeds and actions, and I just couldn't get behind the guy playing him (Danny Huston). What, we couldn't get Brian Cox to reprise the role and just give him some of that young-looking CGI stuff we fed Xavier and Magneto at the beginning of X3? He wanted the part. For someone who apparently figured so prominently in Wolverine's past, Stryker came off flat.
Speaking of characters ... there are far too many in this movie. A lot of the characters promoted in the previews turned out to be nothing more than glorified cameos, and most of those were mere bastardizations of said characters. Consider:
Emma Frost ... in the comics, she is the deadly White Queen, a character who in recent years has gone from one of the X-Men's mightiest foes to one of their leaders (and Cyclops' girlfriend, for some reason). She's also British. You see none of that in this film, nor do you see her use her telepathic powers. All you see is that diamond skin thing she's got going on, and she's just some scared teenager. A scared American teenager. FAIL.
Kayla Silverfox ... in the comics, she was one of Wolverine's many lovers, and someone who was given accelerated healing by the Weapon X project (in the movie, she can convince people to do things by touching them). This is all well and good, but the movie also tries to tell us she's Emma's sister. FAIL #1. The movie also fails to tell us who the hell she is before her first "death." I had a hard time feeling for the character or her relationship with Logan when I spent much of the film wondering who she was. FAIL #2.
John Wraith (will.i.am) ... a teleporter who once worked alongside Logan in Stryker's military missions. This is a case of a lot of potential going to waste; Wraith really doesn't amount to anything more than an informant for Logan -- who predictably meets his demise around the middle of the movie. Chalk this one up to there being too many characters.
The Blob is also a casualty of this flaw -- not to mention the character isn't the product of an eating disorder. I originally thought his real name, Fred Dukes, was wrong, but apparently over the years, Marvel finally gave the character a real name. Again, nothing more than an informant along the way and a complete butcher job on one of the franchise's longest-standing characters.
Agent Zero had his purpose -- Stryker's right-hand man, one of Logan's early antagonists -- but what the hell was Bradley (Dominic Monaghan)? Oh, look, he can turn on light bulbs! Most. Pointless. X-Men. Character. Ever.
Now to the biggest offenders: Cyclops and Gambit. Now, I like Cyclops as a character, but why is he in this movie?! Scott Summers' past has nothing to do with Weapon X or Wolverine. He was never kidnapped in a school in Ohio by Sabretooth; Summers spent his childhood in a Nebraska orphanage unknowingly undergoing experiments from a character we would later know as Mister Sinister (hell, that could be its own movie). Though it was cool at the end how Xavier came in to save Scott and the other mutants, Cyclops' appearance in this movie was contrived and forced.
Gambit, a character I never liked, finally weaseled his way into an X-Men film, and he picked the worst possible one to do it. As far as I can remember, Gambit never had anything to do with the Weapon X project, yet here he is in this film, talking about being one of Stryker's prisoners at "the island." His screen time is minimal when compared to the pre-film publicity the character received, and he feels nothing if not convenient.
Oh, and this island? I figured, considering how the movie butchered almost everything else, this would be Genosha -- the island mutant sanctuary from the comics. Nope -- it's Three Mile Island. As in the nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. That's right -- somewhere along the line Stryker moved his operation from Alkali Lake in Canada (the correct and original location) to an abandoned nuclear plant.
Am I the only one who sees the potential disaster in that?
Anyway, one last character to get into before I talk about the few good things about Wolverine. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) was a treat, especially once one discovered he was Stryker's latest Weapon X creation. This one, the creators got right -- for the most part. For one, Deadpool could still talk once he underwent the change in the comics, and he wasn't some puppet for Stryker, either. He was still the wise-cracking smartass who could kill 20 people with automatic weapons and not break a sweat.
He also didn't have all those powers. He had the healing, he had the adamantium implants, but he could neither teleport nor shoot beams from his eyes.
Still, that fight scene with Deadpool, Sabretooth and Logan was easily the highlight of the film. Excellent sequence, really. The scene in which Logan finally receives his adamantium was also a powerful and well-done moment in the film, but the sad truth is ... such moments were too few and far between. For every moment I sat with a geeky grin on my face, I had another 10 moments of head-scratching and asking myself "What the fuck ...?"
The film claims that adamantium is an indestructible metal derived from a meteorite Stryker found in Nigeria. While such an explanation worked in Smallville -- because Kryptonite was actually a part of the fallen planet Krypton -- this explanation in Wolverine is a slap in the face to the fans. Adamantium wasn't a derivative of something from space; it was a man-made alloy.
Hugh Jackman was great as Logan -- no surprise there. Problem was, there wasn't all that much for him to work with. X-Men Origins: Wolverine suffers from a lack of identity, betraying too much of the original tale and trying to force so many characters into the film that anyone not named Wolverine, Sabretooth or Stryker can't get a word in edgewise.
The film also loses a lot of focus as a result.
A sequel is rumored to be in the works, a story that would detail Logan's time in Japan. While that stands as one of Wolverine's best stories (written by X-Men legend Chris Claremont and drawn by 300 and Sin City czar Frank Miller), I'm worried about that adaptation after watching this film. The forthcoming Magneto and Deadpool films also worry me, because I'm afraid the same creative team will smear their greasy fingerprints all over those, as well.
I might've liked this movie more had I not already known the majority of Wolverine's backstory, but as it was, this film was inaccurate, cluttered and some of the special effects looked awful cheap for a film that took over $140 million to create. The X-Men trilogy set the bar high, but rather than go for the pole vault, X-Men Origins: Wolverine decided to play limbo.
Do what I'm going to do next week: go see Star Trek instead.