Reviewing The X-Men Prequels
After the disappointing reception of X-Men 3 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it was clear that audiences were not enjoying the way the franchise was headed. The filmmaking team responded with a soft reboot, giving us a fresh look at familiar characters in a way that absolutely sets the timeline tumbling down the toilet. James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence take the spotlight from Stewart, McKellen, and Jackman, and for the most part deliver on all the action and fun of their predecessors.
X-Men: First Class (***)
In which 80% of the women are scantily clad because it’s empowering
Look, it’s not bad, but I’m honestly feeling like I haven’t been missing much of anything by staying away from the mutant-verse.
First Class kicks off a series of prequel films – sort of – to the original X-Men trilogy. I say ‘sort of’ because as best as I can recall, the next film in the franchise tears the fabric of space-time to bits. One of the first things that I didn’t understand in this film was how Magneto didn’t kill the Nazi that killed his mother. Like, take a second and remember this scene – Erik (Magneto) is in an office with a Nazi. The Nazi pulls in his mom and says he’ll kill her unless Erik can move a coin with his mind. Erik fails, and then the Nazi pulls the trigger and she dies right next to her son. This is where you’d imagine Erik would lose it, pick up all the sharp objects in the room with his mind, and totally murder the guy. But that’s not what happens. Erik just screams, crumples some metal, and then stands there facing the man who just murdered his mother. I’m not saying I’m encouraging a kid to commit murder – but the motivation makes no sense at all here, especially given that Erik spends the rest of the movie concerned with revenge.
I thought there was a bit too much sexualization of female characters in this film too, while I’m at it. I know the first three X-Men movies had essentially a naked woman walking around all the time, but here, all four leading actresses (Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, Zoë Kravitz, and January Jones) spend time in lingerie/underwear or naked. If the story can’t be interesting without that component, it might not be worth telling. That just didn’t feel right to me.
What saves this film is its commitment to the relationship between Erik and Xavier, which has been the best part of the whole franchise all along. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy both do a great job, showing a side to these characters that we haven’t necessarily seen before. The Wolverine cameo was fun too, but what made the movie worth the price of admission was seeing Xavier and Erik create the X-Men piece by piece. It was also interesting to see the relationship between Mystique and Xavier, because it provides more depth to the original films upon a rewatch.
So altogether, this wasn’t bad. The actors did a good job and there was a feeling of newness to the franchise that was sorely needed after X-Men Origins. That said, I doubt I’ll watch this again.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (***1/2)
In which the timeline gets more convoluted than Cinderella III
This film is wildly confusing and too fun to care about it.
The rules of time travel are never simple. Causality usually goes out the window, but it’s always in exchange for a fun story. That’s exactly what happens here. The rules of time travel for Wolverine make zero sense, but hey, it’s a good story.
The idea is that Kitty Pryde – yeah, that’s her name – can transport people’s consciousness back in time due to her phasing ability. I’m not sure how being able to walk through walls means you can time travel, but whatever. But while your consciousness goes back into your body from the past, Kitty has to keep working the entire time you’re back there – so essentially, two time periods are running at once. Okay, that doesn’t really make sense, but this way there gets to be drama at both ends of the narrative, so fine. Once Kitty ends the time travel stream, whatever you’ve done in the past takes effect and changes the future. So as we see in the film, characters will be sitting around Kitty about to die, but at the last second, she releases her time travel grip and they all disappear because they were never there to begin with.
Here’s the big problem with this. It’s not just that you’re changing history – it’s that you’re erasing it. The X-Men want to go back in time to prevent the Sentinels from being created, but to do that would be to undo everything that has ever happened since their inception. Think of the billions of lives that would be erased in a heartbeat – the loves, the memories, the accomplishments. Yes, the X-Men are in an apocalyptic setting, but remember what Tony Stark said in Endgame. “Bring back what we lost? I hope, yes. Keep what I got? I have to – at all costs”. How many good lives would you erase to wipe out an unspeakable evil? I get that they’re out of options – but they’re not only erasing the lives of everyone around them. They’re also effectively erasing themselves. Yes, you’re securing a brighter future for the people of the past, but you’re erasing anyone and everyone in the present that you now inhabit. I feel like we could circle this moral dilemma for some time, but for now let’s move on to the movie itself.
Once you get over the time travel logistics, this becomes a movie about Wolverine trying to convince everyone that the Sentinels are a bad idea. And for what it’s worth, that part is great. It’s fun seeing him interact with characters that don’t remember him, particularly his relationship with Xavier. Jennifer Lawrence’s Raven is also really compelling, though I didn’t love how much of her character was seemingly reduced to being a pawn of Magneto or Professor X. Every time she’s with one of them, they urge her not to listen to the other one. Why couldn’t there be a scene where she leaves both of them behind? She’s not Magneto’s, and she’s not Xavier’s. She’s her own person who makes her own decisions.
The highlight of this film is undoubtedly Quicksilver and his role in busting Magneto out of the Pentagon. It’s a real shame they didn’t utilize his character more in future films. He gets a good scene in the next flick, but not much more than that. His scene here is a wonder of movie magic, and it’s a travesty they didn’t include him more.
In terms of entertainment value, I’d say this is the best film in the franchise. I really liked how Wolverine got a happy ending, even if the timeline is royally messed up and I have no idea what happened and what didn’t happen. Great performances, a fun story, and a fulfilling ending make this definitely worth the price of admission.
X-Men: Apocalypse (**1/2)
In which Quicksilver does not appear for nearly enough screentime
Unfortunately, this film continued to remind me that I didn’t miss much by growing up without the X-Men.
Days of Future Past was seemingly the perfect place to end the franchise. The timeline was altered in a way that brought Jean Grey back to Wolverine (sort of), all of our favourite characters were alive, Rogue was back with Iceman, and it was in practically every way a happy ending. So to have a film follow that ending was a bit difficult to understand. After all, we’ve seen the end now, right? We know that everything’s going to work out – which makes this whole battle with Apocalypse feel like nothing more than a minor setback on the road to the ending scene we saw with Wolverine.
The screenplay for this film was written by Simon Kinberg, who had already written X-Men 3 and Days of Future Past. Apparently he said that First Class, Future Past, and Apocalypse form a trilogy about Mystique, but personally I think that’s baloney. I wrote in my review of the previous film that Mystique never really gets out from under the thumb of Xavier and Magneto – she’s a great and compelling character, but she’s constantly presented through a lens of being a pawn of either of the aforementioned male characters. And that doesn’t really change here. If Mystique is going to be her own thing, then she can’t just pick a side between Charles and Erik. She’s got to make her own side, and I don’t think that ever really happens. Don’t get wrong – I like her character; I just don’t like how her character was portrayed.
It goes without saying for anyone who’s seen the film, but Apocalypse is a thoroughly uninteresting villain. He’s about as fun as Thor: The Dark World’s Malekith. He’s not funny, his motivation isn’t compelling, and he looks too weird to be intimidating. He’s a big cartoon, honestly. I don’t want to knock Oscar Isaac, because I don’t think it was really his fault. There just wasn’t anything interesting about this bad guy. And as a result, the entire film suffered.
There’s another great Quicksilver scene in this movie – though it really seems like he doesn’t need to be in the film in terms of the story they’re trying to tell. I’m glad he’s here, but he doesn’t have much reason to be. But apart from that scene, there’s nothing here that I think fans of superhero films need to see. There’s no iconic performance, no big twist, and the action never really excited me. Skip this.
Dark Phoenix (**)
In which we’ve already seen this movie
The final film in my X-Men watchlist turned out to be horrendously uninteresting – which unfortunately is a bit emblematic of my experiencing watching the entire franchise.
There’s no questioning that the X-Men films have been popular, and I’ll even add that I enjoyed a handful of them. X-Men 2, Days of Future Past, and Logan were standout favourites for me. Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, and Michael Fassbender played compelling characters throughout the films. The franchise isn’t without merit. But when I stand this collection of films up to other franchises like Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, or the nearly omnipotent MCU, I find this collection falling short to all three. Maybe that’s because the action doesn’t have the same level of excitement, or because the films themselves tend to strive for spectacle over emotional depth. Whatever it is, this franchise wasn’t my favourite. Maybe these films have a special place in your heart, and if so, that’s fine. But I don’t think they’re for me.
There’s a few things about this film I don’t understand. Firstly, what is the timeline?! Xavier takes Jean Grey as a kid to his school, but we already saw a scene like this in X-Men 3. We also know that Jean Grey exists in the end of Days of Future Past, so is that a different timeline than the one we’re watching now? I just don’t understand where this film fits in with any of the others. And look, I’m sure if I delved deep into a fan wiki, I could figure it out. But I shouldn’t have to do that to understand this film’s connection with the rest of the franchise. The blatant contradictions of chronology in this franchise are super annoying.
I also didn’t get why they killed off Mystique so quickly. Mystique has been an integral part of these more recent films (though I’ve voiced my concerns with her role in previous reviews), so to end her in what is essentially the first chunk of the film feels wrong. You’d think she deserved better than that – but maybe Jennifer Lawrence didn’t want to be on set for longer than she had to at this point.
After that, we’re introduced to an alien race like that’s no big deal. You’re telling me there are aliens in this universe now? There hasn’t been one lick of that throughout the whole franchise up to this point. I know there are aliens in the MCU, but the difference is that the MCU started in 2008 and brought aliens in after four films. Imagine if Thanos had been the first alien in the franchise – it would’ve felt totally different. Why did they have to be aliens? Why couldn’t they have been mutants like everyone else? Am I being nitpicky?
The other thing is that this film is essentially a rehash of X-Men 3. We’ve already seen a film about Jean Grey turning evil. What’s worse, it’s not as though someone else made that film and you decided you could do it better. You guys are the ones who made that film. It’s like trying to hand in a class project twice. Simon Kinberg is credited for writing both films. Like, come on! There’s nothing wrong with wanting to tell a story about Jean Grey. But tell us a new story. Especially if you’re going to blow $200 million on it.
Honestly, I barely cared watching 90% of this film. When it was finally over, I thought, “Okay – I’ve finally watched them all”. But it wasn’t a sense of accomplishment. Instead, it was more of a feeling of “Was that really worth it?”