I wonder how long Fox has the rights to the X-men characters. Probably forever, oh well.
Anyway, after the epic failure that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it seems like fans of the characters were owed a decent film. They almost got it. Not quite.
This film isn’t a reboot (at least I don’t think) it’s a prequel to the first X-men. And while there’s some cool things in this movie, and I will talk about them, lets just get one thing out of the way first. This movie has the same problems all the X-men movies have had. Some of the characters in the movie die and nobody gives a shit.
Fans will recall Brian Singer’s pretty good scene in the first X-men with Magneto-to-be in a Nazi concentration camp. Well, we go into more detail about young Eric’s history with the National Socialist Party. Clearly he survives the camp, though mostly nobody else does. So we next see him in Jewish Avenger mode hunting down Nazi’s in Switzerland and South America. These are actually the coolest parts of the movie. Watching Magneto as a one man Mossad death team is pretty cool. Though a very good murder is almost ruined by a line that sounds like it was written by a Schwarzenegger.
Professor X can still walk at this point and he uses his mental powers to get good grades and to get laid. One assumes he’s having quite a time on college campuses in the 60’s. They could have done more with this, as the one scene where he’s using telepathy to get laid is cut a bit short for almost no reason.
Other characters from the franchise are kicking around doing shit, but the story mainly introduces ones we don’t know. Many of them are in cahoots hoping to trick humans into making the Cold War into a real war (of course they are, otherwise why have a submarine with a bloody mary bar). So the G decides it needs some mutants of its own. And they go to great lengths to make sure there is nothing at all interesting about any of them. Readers of X-men will recognize most if not all of the characters and wonder why they’re having trouble caring.
Because there’s never a sense that anyone important is in real jeapordy. Ever. A couple characters drop out of the sky and land on a battleship in the middle of about 50 marines. Nothing happens. The marines just watch. It’s like they were whispering to each other,”Guys, don’t get involved, those are main characters.”
And when some of them do die, you almost yawn. I say almost because you’re probably already asleep.
So, yeah this was a good idea that was basically utter crap.
3.5 of 10