Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

X-Men: The Last Stand: the review

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Anyone who gave this movie over one star, come over here so I can slap you with my leather driving gloves.

What’s wrong with this movie? Just about everything, starting with the story: a drug manufacturer has come up with a “cure” for the mutant X gene that will turn mutants into normal humans, and they’re going to make it available to any mutant who wants it. The bad guy, Magneto (Sir Ian McKellan), doesn’t believe for a second that use of this medicine is going to be voluntary — this means war, so he bands together a bunch of mutants to destroy the source of the cure. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and some other X-Men want to stop him.

Anybody see the problem with this?

You have a major story problem when your bad guy is right.

The story of this movie asks us to believe not just in an alternate world, where mutants exist, but an alternate humanity, where they’d be allowed to exist one minute more than necessary. We’re supposed to equate this anti-mutant feeling with run-of-the-mill prejudice, but y’know, most despised minorities can’t, as the President says, move cities with their minds.

Okay, beyond the story, we have the script problems. Such as the big set piece in Act 3, which is heavily featured in the trailer, but which I won’t spoil. Sure, it’s big, and sure, it’s cool, but it doesn’t make any freakin’ sense. This is the best way for Magneto to achieve his aims? Wouldn’t it be better to launch his invasion stealthily, stop the anti-mutant cure, and then do the big production number? Or at least consider this beforehand?

And then, beyond that, we have the most amazingly horrible dialogue in recent cinematic history. Film students should be forced to study this movie as an exercise in trite, on-the-nose dialogue. I leaned over to Darin and said, “They couldn’t have afforded a dialogue pass on the script?” Just to, y’know, liven it up a little?

And the way everything is suddenly hunky-dory and sweetness and light at the end? I haven’t felt that disgusted at the wrap-up to a movie since we were supposed to believe that everything was all right at the end of A Clear and Present Danger because Harrison Ford was testifying to Congress. After the gigantic battle in Act 3, anyone would ever trust a mutant again? Idon’tthinkso.

Seriously awful stuff. Avoid.

List o’ Links

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By popular demand (okay, so there was my running bud Rob, and Otto, and mail from reader Richard just this morning…but if that isn’t a quorum I don’t know what is) I have returned a list of my current reading links to the sidebar.

To be technical, what actually happened was I exported a list of my links in OPML, which Rob took and used to write a Ruby script that would generate an HTML version of the list. So I guess you could say Rob has returned my list of links to the sidebar.

Be forewarned, however: since I only read stuff with RSS feeds now (which is why I have eight frackin’ million blogs now), I only have their RSS URLs. You should be able to find the original blog easily enough, however. The RSS feed thing is also why I let my Blogrolling subscription lapse. Which is why we have this homebrewed list instead of the automatic one Blogrolling provided pretty well.

No, I don’t really read all of these blogs every day. Some I haven’t read for a great long while. My current obsession is all things bicycle, which is why I have about forty thousand bicycle blogs. (A really interesting one to read is the complete archives of Oil Is For Sissies, about a grad student who starts out bike commuting to his university, and morphs into a hardcore anti-oil bicycle shop owner.)