Drift Reality > London, England > X-Men 3 and Odeon Can Kiss my Ass

I’m a huge X-Men fan. I used to read the comic book when I was a teenager and I really enjoyed the first two films, which were directed by Brian Singer. Several months ago, when I found out X-Men 3 was coming to theaters I started getting extremely excited and began reading anything I could about the upcoming film.

After waiting a few days for the initial reviews to come out and deciding that the film wasn’t a total disaster, I decided to head to the Odeon cinema on Tottenham Court road to watch an afternoon screening of X-Men 3.

Let me start out by saying that X-Men 3 is the experiential equivalent of going on a date with a beautiful girl and then finding out that “she” is really a “he.” Then you get food poisoning at dinner and the man-woman takes you back to his/her place and ties you up and whips you for several hours. Finally, you pass out in a fit of agony and when you wake up, you realize that you are lying in a random ditch in Bombay, India, with an acute pain in your bottom. After selling your internal organs for enough money to buy airfare, you return home to realize that the man-woman has stolen your identity and your friends and family love him/her more than you.

That is the experiential equivalent of watching X-Men 3.

If you integrate the Odeon-factor into the experience, then you realize that you would have been better off spending your afternoon putting birdseed in your eye sockets and lying down in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

Just in case you were wondering, the Odeon-factor is showing up for a 3:55 PM screening, paying $12.50, and sitting through 30 F#@&ING MINUTES OF ADS.

I’m not even joking. It is disgusting. I literally kept looking at my watch because I wanted to come home and write about how I had to sit through 30 minutes of commercials before they would play this piece of crap film.

So why was the film bad? It is about 10:21 PM (GMT) right now. I want to get to bed by 1 AM so there is absolutely no way I would be able to write about every little thing that irked me about this film so I’m going to limit myself to five things I hated about X-Men 3:

1. I hated the plot of X-Men 3

There is a US government-supported anti-mutant campaign; Magneto wants to respond to the US government plot violently while Xavier stresses the need for diplomacy; Rogue laments her powers; Wolverine experiences internal strife; and Jean Gray dies at the end. Yup – that’s the basic gist of X-Men 2. Unfortunately, all those things happen in X-Men 3 also.

Sometimes it is cool if different things happen in a sequel. The film would have been more original if they had just taken X-Men 2 and re-dubbed it so everyone had French accents. I’m not even joking when I saw I would have enjoyed it more this way.

The only discernable difference is that they throw in a random assortment of mutants with lame powers. One mutant’s power is that he vomits black liquid on people. I can name three people in my student hall who have this same ‘power’. Next time they want to think about adding new mutants to the film, they should bring in a consultant, like a five-year old kid for instance.

2. I hated the dialogue in X-Men 3

During Pyro and Ice Man’s climactic battle, Pyro just about has Ice Man on the ropes when he proclaims, “Looks like you should have stayed at school.” In a burst of power, Ice Man “ices up” and defeats Pyro.

His come back?

“Looks like you shouldn’t have left.”

Errr…I thought comebacks were supposed to be cool. He should have said that comeback when he was losing the fight, then Pyro would have been so befuddled that his head would have exploded and he would have died instantaneously. My head is about to explode just thinking about it.

The other thing line I really hated occurs in the final battle scene, when Wolverine is about to kill Jean Gray. She asks, “You would die for them?” Wolverine responds with, “No, I would die for you.” Then he kills her.

Is it just me or doesn’t it seem nonsensical to say you would die for someone and then kill them immediately afterwards? Maybe he should have said something like “I’ll love you forever Jean,” and then grabbed Callisto and started boning her in the middle of the battle. Alternatively, maybe he could have said, “Jean, I won’t let you do this,” and then given up and sat down Indian style while Jean destroyed the island.

Here is some advice to the producers: put some effort into writing the screenplay next time.

3. I hated the characters in X-Men 3

Every X-Man fan realizes that the Phoenix is bad-ass. Also, when the Phoenix displays her powers, she looks like a sexy crazy woman who is immersed in flames that are shaped like a Phoenix.

So why in X-Men 3 does the Phoenix look like Lindsay Lohan after a weekend of cocaine and bulimia?

The following things additionally irk me about characters in the film: Wolverine is getting boring; Colossus doesn’t have a Russian accent; Beast sounds like he spends weekends at the Blue Oyster Bar (from Police Academy); Angel probably accompanies Beast to the Blue Oyster Bar and serves as his bitch; Storm’s character is one-dimensional; Professor Xavier seemed like a curmudgeon.

4. I hated the lack of logic in X-Men 3

Let me get this straight. Magneto has enough power to lift the Golden Gate Bridge and move it so that it connects to Alcatraz, where the Mutant treatment center is located. Then, the evil mutants begin to storm Alcatraz, where they are stopped by the X-Men.

I’ve got one question: Instead of dropping the Golden Gate Bridge in front of Alcatraz, why not put in the extra effort and simply drop it on Alcatraz?

Problem solved.

Here is another question I had: When the “Brotherhood” of Evil Mutants begins fighting with the X-Men, why doesn’t Magneto just instantaneously kill Wolverine and Colossus? For an evil genius, he certainly seems to lack common sense throughout the film.

Also, how does Wolverine leave Xavier’s school on a motorcycle in one scene and suddenly appear in the forests of northern California in the next? Did everyone just stop what they were doing while Wolverine drove cross-country on a motorcycle for a week?

Come to think of it, they could have made half the movie about Wolverine’s road trip and I would have been happier with the end result. During his road trip, they could have tracked what the individual mutants were doing at the mansion. Storm could have taken Rogue and Kitty Pryde out for a weekend in Manhattan. Maybe Colossus and Ice Man could have gone to a strip club in Jersey, where Ice Man gets the clap.

At least the film would have been original.

5. I hated what the film did for the X-Men Legacy

Not that the X-Men haven’t become overly commodified already, but they really took it to new heights in this film. They basically kowtowed to Halle Barry’s demands; succumbed to market research that said “more Wolverine”; and made the terrible decision to haphazardly introduce and kill multiple mutants because they figured it would be exciting.

I remember when I was a young teenager, the X-Men represented a form of enlightened escapism, a process through which I would immerse myself in their world and extend my imagination beyond it. In my own world that was unfriendly in its own right, I empathized with these characters and perhaps that was the overall message, communicated not in grandiose rhetoric (despite what Brett Ratner might think) but through the small machinations of everyday life.

Along the way, the producers at FOX forgot that X-Men is about the characters, not about the effects, and not about quantity of mutant characters. It is about the love triangle between Jean Gray, Cyclopes, and Wolverine; it is about the struggles of the younger X-Men to deal with adolescence while trying to come to terms with their powers; it is about Peter Rasputin’s introverted nature and his artwork; about Rogue’s rough domestic life; Xavier and Magneto’s contrasting paradigms of resistance; Nightcrawler’s search for love despite his outward appearance; Storm’s struggle with being a leader.

The X-Men is about stories of young men and women with extraordinary gifts, and the various ways in which they deal with these gifts and appropriate their talent into their everyday lives. It is about their search to find an ordinary life despite their extraordinary powers in a world that often can be unfriendly and dangerous. It is about the banalities in extraordinariness.

This was the potential for X-Men 3 and it is the fact that what we got was so far away from what we could have gotten, which pisses me off. What we’re left with is a film that will be forgotten within 2 hours of seeing it.

And I’m out $12.50.