I’ll try and keep the spoilers to a minimum, I won’t ruin endings or anything.
As I said a few days ago, I felt like a traitor. From what I’ve heard, the Superman movie is good in a Summer blockbuster type way, but not faithful to the source material. Particularly, Superman shouldn’t kill. Ever. Anyway, I had also heard that The Wolverine is good, and I’d like to see where the X-Men films would go after the massive success of The Avengers, so I went off to the cinema this afternoon and watched it.
First things first – I watched X-Men: First Class on Friday night. I was utterly amazed by how different it felt to the other X-Men films, and how ’60’s it felt. James McAvoy was pretty groovy as Charles Xavier, and Michael Fassbender was absolutely bewitching as Magneto. Although he did look a little silly in the traditional red-purple Magneto get-up at the end, his performance throughout the entire film was intense and believable. It felt more like an X-Men Origins: Magneto than an X-Men film. Kevin Bacon was surprisingly good as Sebastian Shaw. I was just expecting him to be shit, I’m not sure why. It may have something to do with the fact that all I’ve seen him in recently are the Orange Wednesdays cinema adverts and the EE conga adverts, which are utter shit and quite annoying. Jennifer Lawrence was great as Mystique – bringing a bit of personality to the character that the scripts never allowed Rebecca Romjin Stamos to do. January Jones brought some playful touches to Emma Frost, as well as some nice abs. Let me just say including Moira MacTaggert as an American CIA agent was forced and unnecessary. The story chugged along nicely and was entertaining, the action and special effects were believable – and I was heart-broken at the end when Charles could only repeat that he couldn’t feel his legs over and over.
Now onto The Wolverine. I thought it was absolutely amazing, the best X-Men film (so far), and the film that Wolverine always deserved – it really does the character justice. Hugh Jackman was terrific, and he must’ve worked very hard to look so pumped in every shot, especially as he was barely off-screen at all. I think this is his fifth outing as Wolverine (correct me if I’m wrong!), so he’s really under the skin of the character now and it shows. We, the audience, also know who Wolverine is by now, and what he can do – which I felt really helped the pacing of the film, as it didn’t require any lengthy origin/character exposition stories or un-subtle, out of place, forced recaps. While I haven’t read the actual mini-series that this film is loosely based on, I am familiar with the characters thanks to the X-Universe being incredibly small and incestuous. While all the major players are there, some of them are not in the roles you expect, which does keep things exciting.
The story goes that Logan saved a Japanese guy, the Japanese guy went on to be a major player in the Japanese technology industry, and he is dying. Wanting to not die, he asks Logan to give up his healing factor. Hilarity ensues. Rila Fukushima played Yukio, and she really captured her playfulness. A fine actress, and a fine martial artist. The shape of her head initially made me feel uneasy, but I found her to be unquestionably beautiful by the end of the film. Mariko was played by a very pretty Japanese lady called Tao Okamoto. Her romance with Logan was touching and really felt genuine. Viper was pretty cool – she is another one of those hybrid characters that show up so often in the Marvel films. A mix of one villain here, another there, a random power added in the mix, yeah, why not. Svetlana Khodchenkova done reasonably well, but all her lines seemed to be out of sync with her lips. And I couldn’t take my eyes off her mole – I do feel kinda bad for being so Austin Powers. She has a really brutal final scene too, keep an eye out for it. I won’t go into too much detail with the rest of the characters – I really don’t want to spoil the surprises.
I liked the bit near the start, where Wolvie is walking through the woods, and there’s just a random bear walking behind him and they have that mutual respect thing going on. The fight scenes are punchy and energetic, but you never see any body parts being lopped off – which is an achievement considering that the main character has 12-inch knives made from the hardest (fictional) metal known to man coming out of his knuckles. Especially good is the fight set atop a speeding bullet train – it shows Wolverine to not only be ferocious and a great fighter, but also very smart. He has a few dreams about Jean Grey (actually played by Famke Janssen herself), which I think could be interpreted as foreshadowing. As well as the post-credits scene featuring a news report on Trask Industries (Sentinels!), and Magneto and Professor X asking Logan for help… It’s common knowledge that the next X-Men film is going to be loosely based on one of my favourite X-Men stories of all time: Days of Future Past. Time travel and giant robots – what more do you require? I have a couple of complaints, one being that “The Hand” were renamed “The Black Ninja Clan”, and the 3D was nowhere near as good as the 3D in Star Trek Into Darkness. I wonder why that is? I thought 3D was 3D. The only scene that jumped out was when they were climbing out of the well. In Star Trek every scene looked like it was bulging.
The original X-Men films annoyed me at the time because they stayed too far from the comics, but I realised a long time ago that movies based on comic-books have to have some amount of leeway, they cannot simply re-tread the same ground as the comics shot-for-panel. Bottom line is: As long as they stay faithful and true to the source material, and the resulting movie can stand on it’s own, it’s fine to have some leeway. So yeah, as long as Superman doesn’t snap Zod’s neck, it’s all good.
