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Post by takewithfood on Jun 7, 2011 22:42:14 GMT -5
Why are these filmmakers so afraid to be faithful to the source material? A few changes here and there would be necessary, I'm sure, but they always make at least ten times more changes that that. The point of making a movie out of something like First Class is that it's already a hit - people love it. There is something about that story with those characters that resonates with people. Why mess with that?
Look at how successful the Harry Potter films have been. If Marvel were been in charge, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone would be about a 55 year-old professor of the Dark Arts named Harry Potter who - with the help of his best friend, Nevil, and his love interest, Drakette Malfoy - must build a magical gun that shoots magic bullets in order to defeat his evil twin, the dreaded Lord Gandalf and avert the Cuban missile crisis.
~TWF
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Post by Brainstem on Jun 7, 2011 22:50:07 GMT -5
See, I thought the Cuban Missile Crisis bit was a cool touch, even though it was a bit over the top. The things that bug me are the tiny little changes that they make just to make, not the ones that impact their ability to tell the story they want to tell. There was no reason for Moira to be American, for Xavier to be British (except that Patrick Stewart was AMAZING), or Shaw to be German. Shaw, himself, felt a bit shoehorned in. The character would have been a bit better served as Sinister if only because Sinister has a history of manipulating the present to effect the future (and it could be BS'd as some way to root out the Summers children through Magneto), but I guess they wanted a human reactor core? At that point, why pick Shaw? As I said before, it's not like Shaw is such a well-known mutant that he's in there for name recognition.
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Post by Black Sam on Jun 7, 2011 23:33:24 GMT -5
I don't mind too much when the overlook cannon story to tell their own story, but what bugs me is changing things to put their own creative marking on an icon or ramrod elements together to fit their convenience (Moira, anyone?) It's just not Marvel 616 to me -- each of the Marvel universes has its own spin, and no one gets upset about those. Mostly. Marvel movies are just a different continuity is all. Sometimes they're several different continuities, but...yeah...
Overall I enjoyed the movie. Better than I expected. Didn't amaze me, but I liked it.
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Post by Rushlock on Jun 8, 2011 0:11:26 GMT -5
I assumed her showing up in Erik's bed as her "turn" moment. Especially after she blantantly came on to Xavier, even if to just make the point of her desire to be wanted, even in blue form. As for Angel not filling her role, I disagree. You may not of noticed, as they try to be subtle about these things, but she was black Darwin was too *gasp*. One turned 'evil' and the other died. Token roles filled! Wait til the right media gets ahold of this =P
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Post by Brainstem on Jun 8, 2011 0:19:11 GMT -5
I agree that they made an obvious scene out of her "turn," but she didn't show it in the character. The character didn't really ever look like she had turned except where the script directly has her doing something obvious, like in the scenes you mentioned. Only once did I almost see her stride like Mystique in the original films, and it was quick enough to seem like an accident.
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Post by bcbullseye on Jun 8, 2011 0:59:10 GMT -5
I thought this was the best X-film yet. I really enjoyed it, which kind of surprised me. I thought the trailers looked really good, but earlier in the year, I was thinking I would seen Green Lantern, Thor, probably Cap, and maybe this X-Men movie I know nothing about. But after seeing it, I have a feeling it might be my favorite movie of the summer. Very fun, even if Emma Frost was a bit of a stiff.
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Post by WildKnight on Jun 8, 2011 6:18:08 GMT -5
I'm not a big fan of deviation from the source material, but IMO this movie committed the even worse sin of making every significant political event revolve around the super powered beings. I HATE when that happens in comic books.
The Cuban Missile Crisis would have made a great backdrop for the film. Making it something that a mutant engineered, and that turned into a "the whole world hates mutants!" moment rather than letting it be something that held its own weight, for all of humanity, really bugged me.
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Post by takewithfood on Jun 8, 2011 7:01:49 GMT -5
Don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the backdrop, too. Really, my only complaint about the concept itself is that we know how it ends, but that's generally true of any "let's save the world" plot anyway.
The real problem is that, when you change so many things in a movie, even the reasonable changes just feel like they're being added to the pile of frivolous ones. They all weigh the film down collectively, until you realize that you can't recognize anything but the names anymore.
Shaw is definitely a weird pick, and weaving him into the holocaust was a mistake, I think. I like the suggestion of using Sinister; I would have preferred they either do that, or give us the real Hellfire Club.
I re-watched the X-Men trilogy with friends over the last few days to see how the movies match up. We didn't all agree, but for me its X-Men > X2 > First Class > X3 > dental surgery > Origins: Wolverine.
I'll have to re-watch the Spiderman movies sometime, but going on memory, this is my overall Marvel list:
Iron Man > X2 > X-Men > Thor > Spider Man 2 > Spider Man > Incredible Hulk > Iron Man 2 > First Class > Spider Man 3 > X3 > spilling hot coffee on my crotch > Origins: Wolverine. First Class and everything before it are movies that I would or have seen more than once. I think only the top four are movies I'd rather buy than rent.
I wonder where Cap will fit in. EDIT: I don't even feel like trying to put Blade and Daredevil in there, but they're probably all somewhere around Spider Man 3.
~TWF
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Post by WildKnight on Jun 8, 2011 7:15:11 GMT -5
I'm sure that, because of my devotion to the character, Cap will be much more painful for me than for most others (much in the same way I find the Superman movies to be extremely painful to watch, whereas Batman, a character I'm much less invested in, is only mildly irritating to see Hollywood ruin)
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Post by Hypester on Jun 14, 2011 21:32:16 GMT -5
I really don't like how they utilized the black characters. I knew it would be bad because they were in the uncostumed shot in the trailer, but not in the suited up shot. I didn't know how bad. I really can't express how irritating that aspect of the film was for me.
I accepted long ago that it wouldn't be 'our' X-Men, but that was easy for me because from the very first X-Movie, I felt that this franchise was far from the comics, and were really just Wolverine movies, to their own detriment. Seeing it with low expectations on canonicity, I enjoyed it very well. Fox is going to continue with THEIR X-Men continuity, so, no hope there.
That said... there's enough fridge logic (wasn't storm a child in the 80s in Wolvie Origins? She was also a child in the 60s??) to really make me wonder... why wasn't this done with younger versions of the cast we know from the films? Havok was just Cyclops. Banshee was Storm plus comedy relief. After all, as Xavier said in the films, Ororo and Scott and Jean were some of his first students... the continuity is already swiss cheese, and the one-liners about people looking younger don't make it any better.
I see why they used Shaw, though. His power, and affiliation, basically ran the story. Sinister could not have done that.
Overall, a great movie. I heard someone compare it to an old school James Bond movie, and that seems like a very solid comparison to me.
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Post by Brainstem on Jun 14, 2011 21:59:09 GMT -5
Well, you could reason that the three of them were the first students at the academy, which was founded after this movie.
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Post by takewithfood on Jun 14, 2011 22:00:47 GMT -5
Yeah, about the racial issues: The black guy dies first, and the other black character inexplicably does a face-heel turn in the same scene, conveniently leaving an all-white cast. The only other visible minority in the film, Riptide, has no lines, and is already a bad guy.
On one hand, there aren't a whole lot of minority characters in comics to begin with - but on the other hand, if you're going to cherry pick someone like Angel Salvadore out of nowhere for no apparent reason, at least give her some character development.
~TWF
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Post by Black Sam on Jun 19, 2011 16:20:09 GMT -5
Just read this review by one of my favorite authors (Orson Scott Card) and thought I'd share it. How nice -- all those superhero comics that I didn't care about as a kid are now being made into movies, some of which are actually entertaining.
There are diehard comics fans who complain about changes to their beloved characters for the sake of a movie.
There are diehard fans of earlier movies who complain about changes made between a movie and its sequels and prequels.
What seems weird to me is the tendency to reboot storylines. Admittedly, some series went so far awry that there was no saving them -- which is why DC Comics' Superman and Batman series needed serious rebooting.
But Spider-Man? The Sam Raimi version (the one starring Tobey Maguire back in 2002) was excellent -- in fact, its excellence was part of the reason why superhero movies became all the rage again. Nor were the sequels awful or embarrassing.
Yet in 2012, a mere ten years after the first Spider-Man, we're going to get a complete re-do. Why? How are they going to improve on the excellent 2002 script by David Koepp?
Answer: They aren't. This new one will be all about 3D. And, for all I care, they can stuff it. If I want to see a movie version of Spider-Man, I can play the DVD at home -- and I don't have to put on stupid glasses to get a more artificial and annoying FX-centered version.
What an interesting progression. DC Comics proves that there's money to be made in superhero comics movies, but nobody has the clout or the wit to keep the quality high on the Superman and Batman sequels.
Marvel learns this lesson and comes out with a much higher grade of superhero movies with X-Men, Iron Man, and, of course, Spider-Man. (Admittedly, the Iron Man sequel was as empty as a Cheerios box in the hands of a two-year-old.)
DC gets the message and we see reboots of Superman (kind of lame) and Batman (successful).
(There are also perfectly dreadful movies like The League of Extraordinarily Tedious Gentlemen and The Frenetic Four and two kind of awful versions of The Incredible Hulk, just in case we thought that they'd forgotten how to make moves that suck.)
But then, having given us terrific writing and acting in enough superhero movies to prove that they know it's possible, they're going to start rebooting the good series?
This Monday night my teenager and I went to see X-Men: First Class. I'd been told that it wasn't so much a prequel to the X-Men movies (the ones with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman and James Marsden) as a reboot that shows the origin of the X-Men.
Maybe that's so the writers of XMFC could stretch their creative wings without worrying too much about contradicting details in the other films.
Me, I didn't care anyway, having no longtime relationship with the X-Men or their movies.
Not that I don't love mutants -- don't we all love the mutants? -- heaven help the politically incorrect person who has any kind of bad feelings about people with superpowers who can go around killing regular humans and nobody can stop them. They're all such bigots, to think they have a right to defend themselves; who do they think they are?
I'm just saying that if the filmmakers can make an entertaining movie out of the premise, good for them, and they get some of my money.
Which they did, and so they got it. (Actually, they got my money first, but that's the kind of twisted transaction that keeps showbiz alive -- I make my living from the fact that people pay for my books before they read them.)
XMFC starts near the end of World War II, then jumps forward to the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Turns out that crisis was actually caused by the manipulations of an evil mutant named Sebastian Shaw, played brilliantly by Kevin Bacon.
All the other actors do a lovely job, ranging from adequate to interesting; it's Bacon who carries this movie. (Now that Jeff Bridges has his Oscar, Kevin Bacon is the most underrated American actor.)
There are some powerful moments in this movie, but the strongest of them are in the set-up, where Nazi atrocities are used merely to provide motivation for superheroes later. Is anybody else uncomfortable with using the kinds of horrors that happened to real people in World War II as mere popcorn fodder? I guess I'm the only one.
Anyway, it all works. There are cool FX as we find out different people's superpowers. James McAvoy, one-time faun in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is really good at making intense facial expressions when he's sending his augmented mind-reading powers out to identify as-yet-unfound mutants.
Miraculously, genius Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) has somehow come up with a machine for amplifying the abilities of a mind-reader -- without having a mind-reader around to practice on. Just plug in Charles Xavier (McAvoy) and the machine works without a glitch. Hey, mutants can do anything.
And that's the problem with the whole X-Men premise. I'd love to see a good story or movie about the next jump in human evolution -- but a plausible one, where the improvements are within the bounds of possibility. Sadly, though, I'm the only one -- what the public wants, apparently, is for the next stage of humanity to be magic.
Because that's what this is -- a movie about wizards who can only cast a couple of spells each. After a while, the science talk is only irritating (when it isn't laughable).
Fortunately, the screenwriters know this -- they leap this movie forward so fast that you hardly notice your bladder filling and then it's over. Never mind that no characters and relationships are explored at anything other than the token level.
This is not a movie that needs deep characterization. Give everybody an iconic, obvious bit of motivation (Shaw killed my mother; I want to feel pretty; I'm smarter than everybody but I'm nice; I will rule the world for the good of the species; I'm shy but I can kill you) and run with it.
Truly. I'm not being sarcastic. Not every movie has to be Ordinary People. And that one had its shallow, iconic motivations, too (it was my fault my brother died; no it wasn't; that's a relief).
My point is that X-Men: First Class has story enough to make us lean forward in our seats until the end, while we feast our eyes on the spectacle.
And it wasn't 3D. Thank you, thank you, thank you, O ye producers!
It may bother you how much you enjoy the slow-motion moment-of-vengeance near the end; but I was intrigued by the fact that almost everybody's moral choices made sense. This is a movie where you can see both sides of almost every issue. (Not the Nazis. They don't try to turn them into a moral grey area.)
Go to the theater. See it big. It's fun. At moments it's even moving.
* Postscript on race in X-Men: A friend of mine also saw X-Men: First Class and noticed something that completely sailed right past me. Mostly because I'm a white guy and he's not. So I left my original review intact -- you just read it -- and now I append this second set of comments, which really changed my view of the movie.
"The first and only 'good' mutant killed was black," my friend pointed out. "And his code name is Darwin." (My friend has already shown me countless examples of how black people are often depicted as less-evolved, closer-to-the-beast than white people.)
"He explains that he has the ability to adapt to any environment ... then he gets killed." I remember that it did bother me at the time that his was the only mutant ability that didn't actually work.
At first it looked like he was going to find a way to adapt to the bad thing that Shaw had put inside him, and maybe become something else, the way "the Beast" later adapted to a drug -- it would have been cool. But then he died. I was disappointed, but I wasn't seeing it as "look what this movie is doing with the black male."
"I had to take all of this in while characters in the movie constantly state how the more evolved will overcome. So," says my friend, "the black guy named Darwin couldn't overcome. And he was the only mutant in the movie not to."
Then my friend moves on to the black girl, played by Zoe Kravitz. "Her backstory is that she's a stripper. Moira McTagget is shown as a stripper as well, but this was just a cover she was using while she did the important work of battling the enemy covertly. But the black girl really is a stripper, and though she doesn't get killed like the black man, she is the first mutant to run over to the side of the 'bad' mutants."
My friend saw that surviving victims of the holocaust were shown "much dignity and moments of heroism." But not survivors of slavery and Jim Crow oppression -- which was still very much going on during the era of the movie.
Cuban missile crisis ... 1962. This is after Brown v. Board of Education, but well before the Civil Rights Act. In America in that time, having a black guy and a black girl placed in the same facility, treated as complete equals by the whites, would have been a big deal; but it's as if the holocaust can be remembered by this film, while segregation can't.
And this in a movie supposedly about battling hatred.
My friend writes: "I first began reading the X-Men before I could even read! It simultaneously breaks my heart and turns my stomach to see the comic (that was about battling the forces of bigotry) become a movie that joins countless other movies (and plays and books etc.) that basically give blacks the middle finger and a slap in the face. I feel nothing but contempt for it now."
There are blacks who see bigotry and racism in places where they don't exist. But my friend is not one of them. Yes, he's certainly more keyed into this than I am, because he grew up black in America and I didn't. But that doesn't change the fact that blacks played certain roles in this movie -- only guy who fails and dies, stripper girl who is the first turncoat -- and those roles are demeaning by any standard.
(The genie-like Azazel is dark, but he's depicted as Moorish, not American black.)
I'm betting that the motive here was not racist. The writers were dealing with X-Men from an era in Marvel Comics' history when sympathetic black characters were hard to find. In creating Darwin, they may have thought they were putting in a black guy that didn't exist in the original, and they certainly made him likable and interesting.
But then they killed him -- to show the power of the baddest dude so we'd be more scared, and to deal with the fact that there isn't a sympathetic black guy among the early X-Men.
Maybe they were oblivious to the fact that many blacks do get tired of how they are so often depicted as somehow "closer to evolution" (i.e., closer to apes) than white people.
I definitely watched a different movie from the one my friend saw. But the one he saw was just as real as the one I saw -- I just wasn't equipped to see it.
I'm not calling anybody involved in making it "racist." But I am saying that maybe they needed to be as sensitive, writing about the Jim Crow era in America, as they were about the way they handled the holocaust. And they definitely were not careful. www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2011-06-09.shtml
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Post by WildKnight on Jun 19, 2011 16:29:40 GMT -5
Someone posted a video saying they are gonna boycott this film. Why? (If it’s anything like the Thor boycott it just might convince me to see the movie. Stupid f-ing racists) People who don't want to see classic characters have their races switched aren't necessarily racists. I'm not discounting the possibility that a lot of the problem might come from racists, but some people are just purists (like me). Of course, I guess I'm not purist enough... I didn't care about Fury or Heimdall being black at all. Though when Glover wanted to play Spider-Man, that really irritated me (or rather, I should say when he joked about playing Spider-Man and a bunch of people turned his joke into a huge racial crap storm)
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Post by Puck on Jun 19, 2011 16:42:20 GMT -5
Orson Scott Card, is epic. The End.
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