“Just because someone stumbles and loses their way, doesn't mean they're lost forever.”
Director Bryan Singer returns for the 7th X-Men movie, this time with a time-travel twist. Wolverine, Professor Xavier, Magneto et al are back for another instalment in the 3rd highest-grossing superhero franchise of all time.
THE FOURTH WALL RATING: 7/10
Overall, a highly enjoyable film with great special effects and excellent acting. Pros: great special effects, great acting, a juicy time travel premise and Quicksilver! Cons: massive continuity issues, characters’ motivations are not clear and no real villain to anchor the film. But who cares – as with most time travel films, it’s a thrilling ride as long as you don’t think too hard about it!
Genre: Action/Fantasy/Superhero | Director: Bryan Singer | Writers: Jane Goldman, Simon Kinberg & Matthew Vaughn | Actors: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Ellen Page, Peter Dinklage AND Ian McKellen + Patrick Stewart | Cinematographer: Newton Thomas Sigel | Studio: 20th Century Fox, Marvel Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Productions, The Donners' Company & TSG Entertainment | Producers: Lauren Shuler Donner, Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg & Hutch Parker.
One sentence description: The X-Men race to prevent a war between machines and mutants.
One (long) sentence review: A solid superhero film with good acting and special effects, but suffering from a weak script and odd characterisation.
One (long) sentence review: A solid superhero film with good acting and special effects, but suffering from a weak script and odd characterisation.
Watch it if…You like your Marvel franchises!
Don’t watch it if…You prefer the Chris Nolan-type superhero films.
Best thing about the film…Quicksilver.
THE PLOT
So, here’s the
plot: in a dystopian future, machines have nearly destroyed all humans and
mutants. However, a small group of dedicated mutants continues to fight back – Xavier,
Magneto and a few others, including Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who can project
consciousness back in time. The downside is that the projectee’s body and Pryde
need to be in good shape in the present (i.e. alive and healthy). So Xavier and
Magneto use her to project Wolverine (because only he can sustain the brain
damage caused by projecting so far back) into 1973 to prevent an event from
occurring that would spark the machine/mutant war that decimated their numbers.
The event is
Mystique killing the industrialist (yes, this was a thing in the 1970s) and
military scientist Bolivar Trask, which would lead to her capture and
extraction of her DNA. The military would then use her DNA to build a
Terminator-style machine that can track and kill mutants with ease. So Wolverine’s
consciousness goes back in time to track down Xavier and Magneto. Together,
they must stop Mystique killing Trask. Simple, right?
THE REVIEW
In X-Men films past,
Wolverine epitomised the American ideal of ‘rugged individualism’ in the most
rugged and individualistic way possible. However, his wings are truly clipped
in this one, as the young Xavier and Lenscher/Magneto take over. Wolverine still
gets the odd withering putdown (“so you were always an asshole”) but otherwise
he’s basically a plot device. Pity – his “go fuck yourself” in ‘The Last Stand’
was probably the greatest quality-to-screen-time ratio in superhero films. No,
instead we follow two rising stars of English-language cinema: Michael
Fassbender and James McAvoy. The latter gives a very moving performance as a
broken man who, well, just has a lot of feelings for a grown man.
This film does everything it can to avoid the present: we jump to the future, and from there we flashback to the 1970s, so the film can take advantage of Cold War paranoia. That war's us v them mentality pervades the whole film. However, it's more complex than that: Magneto is a bad guy in the past but good in the present and while Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) is a villain of sorts, our heroes spend the whole film trying to save him, not kill him.
Given the meagre screentime given to Trask, the film doesn’t really have a villain, which is a boon or a curse depending on your viewpoint: do the bad guys need to defeat a bad guy, or are the good guys their own villains? In an art film, the lack of a villain is natural. However, in a film where Magneto floats a stadium around the White House and the US incarcerates its most dangerous criminal directly under the Pentagon, it’s clear that this is not the Andre Rublev of superhero franchises. This film lacked a real villain, but instead it gave us a civilisational conflict.
For Trask played by Dinklage, in another film, there would perhaps be the irony that the man looking to attack a group of humans for being different happens to be a dwarf. However, XMDOFP is an irony-free zone: there is absolutely no reference to Dinklage’s size and the film is all the better for it.
Given the meagre screentime given to Trask, the film doesn’t really have a villain, which is a boon or a curse depending on your viewpoint: do the bad guys need to defeat a bad guy, or are the good guys their own villains? In an art film, the lack of a villain is natural. However, in a film where Magneto floats a stadium around the White House and the US incarcerates its most dangerous criminal directly under the Pentagon, it’s clear that this is not the Andre Rublev of superhero franchises. This film lacked a real villain, but instead it gave us a civilisational conflict.
 |
| Wolverine confused |
The human side
of this equation was quite limp for me, because it’s never clear what exactly
is driving Trask - did he have a nasty brush against mutants as
a child? Is he some sort of militaristic nationalist? Although previous films
have established the tension between the two species, a clip or two of Trask being
turned against mutants would’ve made his motivation much clearer. Speaking of the
humans, some applause please for Mark Camacho’s portrayal of Nixon - he
really nailed the popular image of Nixon, while it was amusing to hear Erik/Magneto
imply that JFK was a mutant (presumably his special power was influencing
women).
In any case, the
mutant side is the real heart of the film, about the relationships formed and
broken between Xavier, Magneto and Mystique in particular. I got the feeling
throughout that Xavier put all the blame for his own descent into alcoholism
and drug abuse (his ‘serum’) on losing Mystique, and not the Vietnam war, which
was always lurking in the background. This war is mentioned in the beginning as
the reason why the school fell apart, but then the narrative quickly settles on
Mystique instead. I suppose yet another film obsessed with Vietnam would’ve
been tedious, but “losing the love of my life” felt a bit thin in a film about saving
an entire civilisation. Like it or not, that’s one of the film’s key points: Charles
had to let go of his personal demons so he could become the Professor Xavier we
all know.
 |
| OMG, JFK was a mutant! Somebody call the FBI! |
Amongst the positives,
we’re treated to a variety of set-pieces that are worth the admission fee
alone: first, the scene where Quicksilver sprints around the room in
bullet-time changing bullet trajectories and generally being a cheeky monkey. [Although I
don’t understand why Xavier and co left him behind – wouldn’t he have been
valuable if the aim is to stop someone shooting Trask?] Then there’s an
excellent scene where a stadium gets moved, which is grander than anything we’ve
seen in the franchises. There’s simply no way to fault Bryan Singer’s
showmanship.
SPOILER ALERT: SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM
Amongst the negatives, we’ve got the scene where Xavier and co find Mystique in a conference room in Paris, only for Magneto to shoot her immediately: if the aim was to prevent the US government getting hold of her DNA, how was shooting her in a room appropriate? Was this a crude plot device or was Magneto ignoring Wolverine’s story and simply looking to settle scores?
Amongst the negatives, we’ve got the scene where Xavier and co find Mystique in a conference room in Paris, only for Magneto to shoot her immediately: if the aim was to prevent the US government getting hold of her DNA, how was shooting her in a room appropriate? Was this a crude plot device or was Magneto ignoring Wolverine’s story and simply looking to settle scores?
Then we’ve got Mystique – although her motivation to kill Trask is fair enough, her decision to protect the humans seems odd and shrouded in sentimentality. This is particularly odd given what she tried to kill Trask just 10 minutes ago. Was this because she'd just realised what a megalomaniac Magneto was?
END OF SPOILER
It’s worth
mentioning that changing Directors mid-stream has led to a disaster in terms of
continuity. For a start, a bunch of mutants from “The Last Stand” (TLS) are
nowhere to be found, save for some pictures in a folder. The problem here is
that Singer is clearly following previous films’ narrative, which is why you
don’t see Storm, Jean, Cyclops, etc. However, Bryan Singer then goes on to
ignore Xavier’s death (TLS again), the only explanation being that TLS’s post-credits
sting (you had to wait for 10mins of credits) implied that Xavier’s consciousness
could be transferred. So we’re expected to think that Xavier’s consciousness
was transferred to a body that looked exactly like Xavier. In conclusion: I’m
probably spending more time writing about it than Singer did thinking about it,
so just forget it and enjoy the ride!
All in all, the
effects were brilliant, as usual, the acting was generally excellent and if it
wasn’t for the missteps outlined above, this film could’ve been the “Dark
Knight” of the Marvel universe. A worthy and highly entertaining effort, even
if Wolverine only got to insult Magneto once.
EXTRA CREDIT
This film must’ve
had a record number of nationalities involved in the main cast: Irish/German (Fassbender),
British (Stewart, McKellen & McAvoy), Canadian (Page), Australian (Jackman
and Josh Helman), French (Omar Sy, with the red eyes), Chinese (Fan Bingbing,
who could open portals) and Mexican (Adan Cant, the fiery one).
AM
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