jono;6137067 said:
I respectfully disagree. There is simply too many angles to cover. X-Men has way too many personalities and stories to cover in 6 hours of film time
That’s BS. Many competent writers and directors could make an ensemble of 6 or 7 people work with every character getting properly fleshed out and having an equally important presence. It works in Robert Altman movies, Tarantino movies, it worked in The Big Chill hell it works in one hour episodes of countless TV shows. The source material for X-Men movies has had single one shot issues (meaning not part of a long story arc) where we get to know 5 or 6 characters much better in 22 pages than we did in 6 hours of film. Just peep the Byrne/Claremont run Rex was referring to in this thread for examples.
It’s about making the screen time for the characters count and have substance. Not just making them glorified cameos. It’s about finding balance, something the X-Men movies greatly struggle with.
Considering they had every intention of doing Wolverine spin-off movies of course they highlighted him more than others.
Actually the fact that they knew Wolverine would get solo movies makes it even more insulting that the trilogy revolved around him. He was going to get his chance to really shine for 2 hours in other movies anyway. I understand why they made him the central character in the first movie even if I would’ve executed things differently. He was the gateway for the general audience to get to know the movie X-Men and this world but there was no real reason for that to be carried onto the sequels.
Wolverine being a maverick with only pieces of his memory intact, Jean & Scott's love story, Prof X and Magneto's differening philosophies on mutant human relations, Wolverine Scott Jean love triangle, Beast trying to be an intermediary between humans amd mutants, Jean losing control of herself and her powers (a different manifestation of it), humans trying to persecute mutants all these angles appear in those movies.
Yes but it was all handled superficially. Did you really care about Xavier and Magneto’s different philosophies? I didn’t because there was nothing to really highlight how different and effective those ideals even were. It was like they just included it for the sake of saying it was included but the context of it all didn’t make it seem effective just forced, Again that goes back to incompetent world building. I did not feel one bit that either was fighting for mutant rights because humans were just indifferent to mutants in these movies outside of Senator Kelly and William Stryker from what we were shown. The humans vs mutants dynamic felt forced and disingenuous because it felt like an after thought. Seems like the only humans who had an issue with mutants were ones in positions of authority and not the regular laymen on the street. Something that even the cartoons accurately depicted.
Jean & Scott’s love story? Again all we gathered was that Scott cared about her because he said “stay away from my girl” and showed concerned for her in 2 or 3 scenes. We didn’t know why he was concerned for her though because we were never shown why because in the end they were complete strangers to us. Neither of them was fleshed out and ended up being stock characters.
We knew about as much about them when we first saw them as we did when we last saw them across the span of 3MOVIES. It was just more superficial nonsense and the sad part is you don’t need 60 minutes to even develop that. In 10 minutes of screen time you could effectively highlight why they’re so important to each other and why their love is so important.
As it was in the movies we couldn’t have cared less and most people rooted for Wolverine to get some ass because they were at least invested in that character. Not conflict presented to the audience in regards to the love triangle or anything. Instead of thinking both “well Scott would be good for her because” and “Logan would be good for her because” creating a conflict in the audiences minds because they could validly argue for both scenarios the audience was left thinking “Logan is good for her cause he’s the only interesting male character on the team”. Which is just wrong.
For that same reason the Phoenix story is ineffective. Why should I care about a force corrupting the soul of a woman I don’t even really know? They have Wolverine crying when he kills her and I guess because he has tears and was the central character of the movie we’re supposed to feel bad too despite having 0 investment in the Jean Grey character in any of those movies.
I mean damn bruh what more could you want?
Balanced filmmaking period. I didn’t care for First Class but from the parts that I did see I give Vaughn credit in at least balancing an ensemble much better than Singer ever did. That nigga made the audience care about Mystique of all characters because he prioritized her presence as much as he did Xavier’s and Magneto’s. That’s how it’s done.
@Broddie what did you think of the anime adaptation of the X-Men?
Never seen it. Up until this post I didn’t even know it existed.
