Sunday, June 04, 2006

X-Men so sad

I used to be a buyer for a comic book store, which is why I hate comics. I love the medium, in fact, it is my favorite storytelling medium. It allows for all the unmarked story elements of prose, many of film, plus there are some really amazing thing you can do with the sequential art. It is a highly compact medium, being able to tell a complex story is a fraction of the length of prose, much less film (consider that it took a mere 4 comics to tell the story of the first X-Men movie and there are 100's of X-Men comics.)

For the most part, the X-Men movies have been an exercise for me in seeing what can and cannot be converted from comics to film. Jackman's Wolverine was a nice surprise that made the whole thing bearable. By far my favorite parts of all three films has been seeing the mutants, whose powers I am embarrassingly familiar with, in motion. Wolverine claws moving under his skin, Colossus' armor flowing over his body. This had been balanced by the ridiculous, a sequence showing first Storm and then Jean Grey using their powers indicated by their blank stares at the out of scene blue screen.

It's an understatement to say the plot of X-Men 3 meanders. If properly treated in comic book form, I estimate it would take at least 20 if not 30 issues. (At 3.50 a pop, the price they were at the last time I stepped foot in a comic book store, that's $70-105 or a handful of movie tickets.) And there is absolutely no reason given for why two of the bad guys were given different solutions at the end. No reason for much of any of it.

Except for Kitty Pryde and Juggernaut. Not really worth the price of admission, but like Nightcrawler's power aria in the second movie, seeing Kitty use her powers against the musclebound, mysteriously Australian Juggernaut was cool.

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