Reviews: Movies – X-Men The Last Stand

Having heard mostly bad reviews for X-Men: The Last Stand since it came out, I had been hesitant to pay money to see it. Finally, it appeared on cable last night, and I got a chance to see what everyone had been so angry about. I have to admit, for about the first half or so I didn’t think it was such a crappy movie, and couldn’t understand why everyone had been so angry. I should note that I think that none X-movies have been very good and this one suffers from the same defects as the prior two movies. These specific defects alone wouldn’t have caused me to hate the movie, and there were some decent additions that made me think it wouldn’t end up being that bad, but on the whole, if I tally up the pros and cons for the series as a whole, I end up with way more bad than good. I’ll put the rest under the cut, in case anyone wants to avoid two year old spoilers.

I’ll list the good stuff first, just to get it out of the way:

1. There was some good casting going on in all these movies, starting with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan as boyfriends/arch-nemeses, Professor X and Magneto. Other casting I found rather inspired: Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, and of course, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. In this new movie I particularly enjoyed Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde.

2. The characterizations of some of the characters were pretty interesting, as well as occasionally reinterpreting the source material in creative ways. Wolverine was truly Wolverine, and Cyclops and Jean Grey were as boring in the movies as in the comics, which I found comforting. The Professor X/Magneto dynamic was well drawn, allowing them to hold respect and love for each other even as they drew to opposite ends of morality. Magneto, with his past as a Holocaust survivor, remained sympathetic even while serving as the villain of the story.

3. As for this latest movie, The Brotherhood of Mutants would have been more appropriately titled The Hot Mutant Lesbian Avengers, considering the casting, costuming, and rather obvious portrayal of Callisto and Arclight as girlfriends.

Okay, now for the bad stuff:

1. Speaking of Callisto and Arclight, why were they even in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in this movie? The X-Men movies don’t really seem to be made by anyone who has ever read X-Men comics or has any interest in remaining loyal to the source material. They are not labors of love like Spider-Man was for Sam Raimi, they are cliched action movies made by hacks like Brett Ratner, who could give a shit less about respecting the X-Men legacy. Yeah, it would be awesome for one of the movies to feature Callisto, but not if she’s just going to be some random Magneto follower, and not bad ass leader of the Morlocks.

2. This disloyalty to the source material has also resulted in a tendency to either whitewash or Americanize the good guys. The Storm of the comics was royalty, a proud Kenyan woman having grown up in awful poverty after losing her family to violence in Egypt. In the movie, she’s Halle Berry. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Halle, but I think it’s rather racist that Storm was downgraded from a strong Kenyan woman with a longstanding commitment to helping her homeland, to a light-skinned African American woman holding absolutely no political affiliation.

This movie followed up on the Storm debacle by taking Colossus and changing him from Russian to American. Why? Why are all the X-Men American? Nightcrawler seems to have disappeared, leaving a force for good made up almost entirely of white Americans, with Storm serving as the one and only person of color (unless we count blue as a color).

Which is not to say there are no people of color in X-Men 3. They’re there, they’re just the bad guys. The “bad guys” in the Brotherhood of Mutants are made up almost entirely by freaks, queers, and people of color like Callisto, Arclight, and that guy who could shoot spikes from his face. And they have a Holocaust survivor as their leader. Let’s just say that I had a hard time rooting for their destruction.

3. Finally, my main problem with all these movies is that they try to fit WAY TOO MUCH stuff into two hour installments. You just cannot feature every single X-Man and every single villain from decades worth of comics into one movie and a few sequels, you just can’t. When you try, you end up shortchanging everyone. The Phoenix storyline just didn’t belong in this movie, as there wasn’t any time at all to explore the character of the Phoenix or allow her to do anything cool. It was just like BAM! She killed Cyclops! (good riddance) BAM! She killed Professor X (what the fuck?) and then BAM! … She stands around in a quasi-Victorian coat looking angry. Shoehorned into the main storyline of Magneto and his fight against the “cure,” the Phoenix storyline was just silly.

Then there was the Rogue-getting-cured storyline (shortchanged!), Mystique getting cured (lame! and shortchanged!) Juggernaut showing up (shortchanged!), and the assorted appearances of a million other mutants who don’t get story lines or even names. Looking at the cast list on IMDb, I see that the movie apparently featured Jubilee, Psylocke and Kid Omega, not that any of those characters had a line or any distinctive characteristics.

However, after all that ranting, I have not reached the biggest problem with this awful, awful movie, which is as follows: Although I’m sure this wasn’t the intention of the filmmakers, the bad guys were actually the good guys, and the good guys were… useless, ineffectual, and, at times, traitorous to their own cause.

The reason I loved X-Men above all as a kid was because the story of the mutants was such a powerful metaphor for the oppression of Others in our society. The mutants are one big metaphor for being queer. They “change” when they hit puberty, are tossed out by their families, spat on in the street, and legislated against by the government. Conservatives are always trying to “cure” them of their “affliction” or kill them entirely, just for the sin of being different.

This makers of this movie did not understand this struggle at all. This movie opens with our heroes, Prof. X’s School for the Gifted, aligned with Beast, now employed by the US government as “Secretary of Mutant Affairs.” Big Pharma has developed a “cure” for the mutant X gene, which they insist will be voluntary, although Beast soon learns that the government has actually used the “cure” to generate weapons to be used against mutants. Beast is, for some bizarre reason considering that the government has behaved similarly in the previous movies, shocked and surprised that he has been lied to by the President of the United States.

Magneto, a Holocaust survivor who has seen this whole thing happen before, and having predicted this obvious development, has begun building a mutant army to fight the “cure.” And here is where, to me, the X-Men and The Brotherhood switch positions as hero and villain.

Beast, in his attempt to work from inside the dominant power structure, seems more like a flunky for The Department of Indian Affairs than an effective check on the government or advocate for his own people. Prof. X’s School, filled with white prep school kids being taught to control their urges, starts to look a lot like the The Log Cabin Republicans.

Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, filled with freaks and queers who refuse to change their appearance in order to be accepted by mainstream society, and who refuse to go along with a policy of assimilation and appeasement, starts to look way more like the radical groups Queer Nation or The Lavender Menace than supervillains.

The inclusion of Callisto as one of the Brotherhood’s leaders, the depiction of the Brotherhood as a ragtag bunch of society’s rejects, and the fact that the Brotherhood hangs out in an abandoned inner city church leads me to think that the writers of this story got The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, legitimate villains, confused with The Morlocks, a band of persecuted freaks who lived in the New York City sewers.

The culmination of the movie is a battle pitting Magneto and The Brotherhood against The X-Men, Big Pharma, and the United States Government. Magneto heads to Alcatraz Island, where Big Pharma has hidden “the cure,” in order to destroy it. There he is faced with the United States military, armed with bazookas, missile launchers, and automatic rifles loaded with syringes filled with the “voluntary” and irreversible cure. Beast, having been lied to and betrayed by the government, still accompanies the X-Men to this battle, defending Big Pharma and a government-backed military force armed with weapons aimed at wiping people like him off the face of the planet.

What follows is a wholesale slaughter of mutants by the US military and the X-Men. The X-Men didn’t go there to try to stop the fight or to just save the small child whose blood was being used to make the “cure.” They went there to join the battle. They don’t fight to disable or disarm, they fight to kill.

Am I supposed to be happy when Wolverine slashes to pieces mutants fighting for their right to exist? Am I supposed to be satisfied when the entire Brotherhood, basically a group of poor kids with no home or family, is massacred? Should I be pleased when the X-Men inject Magneto with the “cure”? They don’t capture him, they don’t kill him in battle, no, they obliterate him as a person. They succeed in doing to him what the Nazis failed to do so many years before. The X-Men are, as Magneto so dramatically monologued earlier in the movie, “traitors.”

“This is why you can’t trust people who say they’re going to work from the inside,” offered my partner at the conclusion of the film, and I would be inclined to agree. This movie pits assimilationists against radicals, it pits people who agree to change so they can fit into society against people who demand you accept them just the way they are. The day this movie came out was a sad day for mutant-kind as well as all the Others they stand for.