Hero Go Home

Last week, we wrapped up our discussion of X2, but I got in a hurry, so I never really gave an overall summation. But basically, X2 did pretty much everything a sequel is supposed to do. It brought back all the things we liked about the first film while upping the volume. We got more mutants, more super-action, bigger stakes, deeper characterization, and a wider view of the world. We also got a ton of Easter Eggs and callouts to the comics. Although the film had its flaws, including a couple of major ones (thanks to Sargon for calling out one that I glossed over in my rush to finish, and for providing me a widescreen copy of this week’s movie), I think it works really well overall.

But now we come to the third film, and third films are often a disappointment, especially for superheroes (see Superman III, Batman Forever, Spider-Man III). And fans were leery going in, since Bryan Singer, director of the first two movies, had left the series to direct Superman Returns, leaving this film to be helmed by Brett Ratner. How will X-Men: The Last Stand hold up?

The film opens (after the obligatory late fade of the ‘X’ in “20th Century Fox”) on an idyllic suburban street that the on-screen caption tells us is “Twenty Years Ago.” But where is this taking place?

Why, in Uncanny Valley, of course.

That is just creepy on a subliminal level. The effects crew supposedly mapped the textures from pictures of their younger selves onto their faces. But they don’t look so much younger as eerily smooth. But the image is just realistic enough that it’s profoundly unsettling. Oh, and apropos of nothing, I wonder how Holocaust survivor Magneto feels about driving around in a Mercedes?

Anyway, the two men are here to recruit a young Jean Grey for Charles’s new school for “gifted youngsters.” And right away, we hit a major theme of the movie when Jean’s parents ask if Xavier can “cure” Jean, offending Magneto with the thought that mutation is a disease. Then they meet the young Jean herself, who demonstrates her powers by lifting every car on the block, effortlessly.

Cameo time! Wow, it came early this time. I could say this is the obligatory Stan Lee cameo, except that he didn’t actually get one in the second film.

But what you may not know is that this sequence also features another cameo. This guy, gaping up at his flying lawnmower…

Is Chris Claremont, the guy who wrote the New X-Men from near obscurity into  fan favorite status and wrote the original storyline that inspired half of this film (the “Dark Phoenix” saga).

But back to the story, because something’s wrong here. In the first movie, Jean’s telekinesis was weak, strong enough to lift small objects and hold a leaping Toad in mid-air, but not strong enough to lift Wolverine. Her powers were much stronger in the second film, but that seemed to be a byproduct of her exposure to the mutation machine or something. Yet here, her powers are even stronger when she’s just a kid. What gives? Everything will be explained later, but you might not like the explanation.

Let’s move on to “Ten Years Ago,” where we see a young boy frantically scraping at his back with what turns out to be a metal rasp. His father breaks in, demanding to know why Warren’s spending so much time in the bathroom (and trust me, parents will never be happy with the answer to that question), only to see the floor dotted with blood and… feathers. That’s right, young Warren (who will, of course, turn out to be Warren Worthington III) is sprouting wings from his back. Time for titles!

Now we visit “The not too distant future” (next Sunday A.D.), a blasted, burning city where the X-Men are fleeing from unseen enemies who are blowing stuff up. And this scene is kind of a demonstration of everything that’s right and wrong with the movie.

As they flee, the different X-Men display their powers. Colossus turns to metal and grabs Rogue so that she will absorb his power and become metal, too, just before they get hit by flying debris. Bobby downs a missile with a blast of ice, and Kitty helps him dodge a second one by grabbing him and turning immaterial. Storm flies in to bitch at Logan, who has just regenerated from a wound.

The action is fast and furious, and the scene is obviously a callback to one of the most popular issues of the Claremont/Byrne run, “Days of Future Past.” Wolverine even calls on Colossus to do their famous “fastball special.”

But there are problems. I don’t love this new look for Colossus. And if you haven’t seen the previous two movies, you will be totally lost here with the characters only briefly even being named. And although the fanboy in me is saying, “Cool, Sentinels!” at the sight of two glowing eyes lurking behind the smoke, we never actually see them in action. We just get one severed head, instead.

But the worst part is Storm, yelling at Wolverine that they need to work as a team,when he and Colossus are doing just that. The conversation continues after Wolverine stops the simulation and we realize they’ve been in the Danger Room the entire time (something they had planned for both previous movies, but which got cut out for budgetary reasons both times).

And Storm’s objections seriously make no sense, becoming mere conflict for its own sake. It’s like the script’s been taken through so many drafts that the words have somehow become disconnected from the actions. And what the hell is up with Storm’s new hair?

Meanwhile, sad Cyclops is sad, thinking of Jean. It doesn’t help that he’s getting what seem to be telepathic messages from his dead girlfriend, shouting his name as he glimpses her drowning. So he takes off.

And now we move to the other plot. We travel to Washington, D.C, and the Department of Mutant Affairs. And the Cabinet Secretary just happens to be the fabulous, furry Beast (played by Kelsey Grammer here in blue fur and make-up, as opposed to the human-faced cameo in X2).

He meets with the President and his staff in the Situation Room, where we learn that Magneto is still on the loose, but Mystique has been captured while stealing documents from the FDA. And what was she stealing? Documents describing a formula from Worthington Labs, synthesized from the DNA of a little bald boy named Jimmy, a.k.a. Leech.

Hank rushes to the X-mansion to tell Xavier and Storm about it: it’s a formula that can “cure” mutants, taking away their powers and rendering them simply human. And really, what the hell is up with Storm’s hair?

Once again, the dialogue seems to have wandered away from the story, with artificial conflict between Wolverine and Beast so that they can find mutual respect later in the film and Storm getting incredibly angry over the idea that anyone would suggest there’s anything wrong with mutants that needs to be fixed. She calls anyone who would take the formula a coward, just before Rogue comes running in to ask excitedly if it’s true.

And in this scene, the writers–Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn (based on a Joss Whedon storyline), although who knows how many hands were in this stew?–have somehow managed to hit upon a very potent issue that they have no time to explore in any depth because there’s too much other shit crammed into the movie.

To wit: the previous two movies have treated mutation as a metaphor for minority, with anti-mutant hatred being portrayed as racism in the first film and more like homophobia in the second. But in this movie, with this issue, they can actually move beyond liberal pieties and acknowledge that mutants, as people with an entire spectrum of needs and beliefs, do not have to believe and behave as a monolithic group. Just as a woman can be against abortion or a black man against affirmative action quotas, Rogue can split with Storm on the usefulness of the anti-mutant vaccine without being a traitor to her own kind.

The vaccine is also being debated at a mutant gathering in what looks like the same abandoned church where Storm and Jean found Nightcrawler in the previous film. And as one dude tries to be the voice of reason, Magneto appears and begins likening the vaccine to the Holocaust. Although the “cure” is being touted as voluntary, Magneto insists that the ultimate aim is to eliminate all mutants, whether they want it or not. And he finds a receptive audience in the form of three of the gang’s leaders.

They seem to be based on the Morlocks from the comics series, although who can tell, because none of these characters even gets a name, another casualty of screenplay drift. Well, with the exception of the big androgynous lesbian or whatever on the left there, who just kind of hovers silently until Magneto calls her(?) Arclight near the very end. The chick in the middle (played by Dania Ramirez, who would go on to play another mutant in the TV series Heroes) can detect mutants and their powers, which fascinates Magneto, because it just so happens the government is keeping Mystique inside a big semi-truck that has been converted into a mobile prison. Magneto hasn’t been able to free her because he hasn’t been able to find her.

But we’ll have to leave that for another time, because Hank McCoy has come to Alcatraz (site of the Worthington Labs research facility) to meet Jimmy the Leech. And there’s a fascinating moment where Hank stares at his restored human hand when it approaches Jimmy.

He seems wistful, remembering his humanity, but he doesn’t step in close to become transformed completely. And  a part of me thinks they rejected it more for budgetary/casting decisions than because it wasn’t something Hank would do.

Oh well, back to the A plot. Cyclops arrives at Alkali Lake, still hearing Jean’s voice in his head. He stands on a big rock by the shore and finally gives vent to his frustration and grief by taking off his sunglasses and zapping.

And if you’ve ever read any of the comics stories that start with Cyclops doing exactly this, you know it never leads to anything good. But this might be just the exception that proves the rule, because next thing you know, there’s a hole in the water, and a blinding light, and Jean appears, alive and with longer hair.

She moves in to kiss Cyclops, but first, she takes off his glasses and uses her power to suppress his so she can look in his eyes without having her head blown off. And while there is a level of fanboy cool to all this, since this entire scene–from Scott’s blasting the water, to Jean’s rebirth, to the suppression of Scott’s power–is a string of callbacks to the comic book series, none of it feels right. Scott doesn’t really seem like Scott, Jean doesn’t really seem like Jean, none of the emotions seem to fit together.

Scott doesn’t care, though. He’s just happy his fiancee is alive and doesn’t ask any questions. He just kisses her.

Oops.

Continued next week…

Time for the concluding chapter to our look back at X2 (also known as X2: X-Men United).

When we left off, the X-Men were in Canada, teamed up with Magneto and Mystique to rescue Professor X and Cyclops from the underground base at Alkali Lake. They had discovered an underground spillway entrance, with gates that needed to be opened from the inside. Wolverine volunteered to go alone, but Magneto objected that Mystique should go. Who won the toss?

Moments later, we see that it is indeed Wolverine entering the spillway and shouting to the security cameras for Stryker to let him in. Guards appear from hidden doors and shackle Wolverine before leading him inside.

Once Stryker gets a look at him, though, he realizes it’s not Wolverine and orders his soldiers to shoot, just a hair too late. Mystique shape-shifts out of the shackles, beats up a few soldiers, and escapes through another bulkhead door. Oh, and for all you folks who thought that was really Wolverine?

She’s such a dainty creature (full disclosure: I do mostly minimal processing to screen captures, normally just adding a little contrast or sometimes doing a high-pass filter for clarity, but this one time, I popped the eyes up just a little bit, for effect).

While Stryker’s men are trying to blow their way through the heavy bulkhead to the control room where she’s locked herself, she opens the spillway doors to let in the rest of the mutants (well, the grown-ups, at least; Iceman, Rogue and Pyro all stay on the plane).

Stryker decides it’s time to move forward on his plan. He leaves two men to break into the control room and takes the rest to the Bad Cerebro. And although I like this movie overall, I have trouble with this one bit.

Yes, the door looks grungy and crusty and evil, but I’m having trouble believing it would look that bad. Supposedly, this is fairly new construction, built for Stryker’s current plan with parts he JUST STOLE from Cerebro a day or two ago at most. This looks like it was built in ancient Egypt and crusted over with the grime of centuries.

Anyway, if you hadn’t figured it out already, Stryker’s plan is to have Jason (his mutant illusionist son who is now mostly mindless after being lobotomized and who knows what else) manipulate Professor X into using this ersatz Cerebro into locating, and then killing, every mutant on Earth. Bad news.

In the control room, Mystique briefs the group–Storm, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Jean, and Magneto–on the situation. Storm notices a monitor showing a group of kidnapped students being held in another chamber (Stryker had planned to test the Death Cerebro on them before going global). Jean says she’ll accompany Magneto to save the Professor, while Storm and Nightcrawler rescue the kids.

And Wolverine? He has gone off by himself after seeing Stryker on another monitor. He’s out for revenge.

On the way to the Bad Cerebro, Magneto and Mystique share some covert looks. They obviously have a hidden agenda they don’t want to bring up in front of Jean. And conveniently, they don’t have to, because Cyclops ambushes them, leading Jean to stay behind and deal with him.

One of the things a good sequel needs to do is show you more of what you didn’t get to see enough of in the first movie. And we get that here. Cyclops, sporting a neck nipple that shows he is under the effects of Jason-juice, doesn’t hold back, blasting Jean to the full extent of his powers.

But she throws up a telekinetic shield with her newly enhanced strength and not only fends off his attack, but pushes back hard enough to send them both flying, knocking him sober and breaking her leg. Oh, and the dam.

Storm and Nightcrawler save the kids from the cylindrical chamber where they’re being held, and Singer even throws in a tiny Easter Egg referring to Nightcrawler’s long-forgotten power of turning invisible when he enters a shadow. Or maybe he just thought it looked cool to have him emerge from blackness, but I’m holding out for Easter Egg.

Back at the plane, Pyro gets tired of waiting and sets out for the base on foot, while Rogue and Bobby stay behind.

Wolverine, meanwhile, discovers the room from his nightmares, the room with the bubbling tank where he was injected with molten metal by faceless green men. Claw marks in the concrete lead him to another flashback showing his escape, nude and bloody, from the wicked place.

As a side-note, we also get a close-up of his gloves, showing the way they’ve been designed to let his claws extend out; a small detail, but a welcome one. Oh, and  speaking of Easter Eggs, check out the x-rays on the wall.

The shots show various enhancements, like the armor-plated head to the left there. Don’t know if that is referring to any particular comics character, but at top right, we see Archangel’s enhanced wing. Top center right is Wolverine’s hand and forearm, showing his claws sheathed in his forearms, and top center left is, um, her.

Stryker shows up with Yuriko (known in the comics, but never named in the movie, as Lady Deathstrike), and after taunting Wolverine for a moment, leaves them to fight alone.

And seriously, although the fight is pretty cool–it’s basically a reprise of the Wolverine/Sabretooth bout from the first film, only faster and more savage–from a dramatic standpoint, I just drop right out of the movie here. Because you’ve got two people who are established as being able to heal from pretty much any normal wound, and their attacks consist basically of stabbing. So I’m not really seeing the point of this fight. The wire-fu is pretty fast and furious, and the multiple stabs look painful, but dramatically speaking, the only tension here is how long they’ll continue this pointless claw waving before someone tries something that will actually work, like, oh, injecting their opponent with a whole tankful of molten adamantium.

Okay, that didn’t really take long at all.

By this time, Professor X’s death wave is starting to affect all the mutants in the world, except Magneto, thanks to his telepathy-blocking helmet. Magneto dispenses with the guards in front of Faux-rebro by remotely pulling the pins from all their grenades. Messy, but efficient.  Then he shuts down the Bad Cerebro and saves the mutants. Happy endings all around.

Oh, wait. Magneto’s a bad guy. He repurposes the machine by magnetically shifting some panels around (not sure why this is necessary, but it looks cool).

Then Mystique disguises herself as Stryker and tells Jason there’s been a change of plans. Magneto and Mystique leave, and Jason orders the professor to use Cerebro to kill all the humans on Earth, sparing only the mutants.

Storm, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Jean and the kids arrive at the fake Cerebro. Nightcrawler teleports Storm inside (a risky move when he can’t see where he’s going) and she drops the temperature until Jason loses his hold on the professor. The world is saved, and just in time, too, because the dam is breaking.

Wolverine leads the group to safety through another secret exit he discovered by following Stryker. But Stryker’s escape helicopter is not where Wolverine left it (Magneto and Mystique took it, along with their newest recruit, Pyro). All looks lost until their plane appears, flown erratically by Rogue (no clue how she knew they needed help or where to find them).

Everybody gets on board and prepares to take off, but now the plane won’t start. Rogue broke it. And time has run out, because the dam has broken.

Which is when Jean sneaks out of the plane and telekinetically starts it and lifts it while shielding it from the oncoming water. She telepathically possesses Professor X to give Cyclops a tragic goodbye, and then her power flares brighter than ever, just before she lets go and disappears under the rushing waters.

But there’s no time to mourn, because the President is about to go on live TV and announce his response to the mental death wave that nearly killed everyone on Earth. But just after he begins his address, the power goes out, a storm blacks out the windows, and everybody freezes except the President.

Then comes the lightning, and with it, something else.

Professor X tells the President that they want to live in peace, although there is a subtle threat in his words as well. But he gives the President the file on Stryker’s activities so that the President can give the public a scapegoat instead of starting a catastrophic civil war.

And that’s it, with the exception of the obligatory mourning for Jean, at the end of which Professor X suddenly senses something and smiles. And what does he sense?

This.

It’s hard to make out when the image isn’t in motion, but that’s the faint image of flaming wings under the waters of Alkali Lake, suggesting that maybe Jean has somehow survived (and if you’re a fan of the comics, you know what this means). Professor X says he thinks everything will be all right.

Join us next week to see just how wrong he is.

Continuing our recap of X2, the Marvel mutant sequel directed by Brian Singer. When we left off last week, Professor Charles Exxxavier and Cyclops had been captured by Stryker,  Nightcrawler had been captured by Jean Grey and Storm, and a bunch of soldiers were just beginning an assault on Xavier’s school.

The soldiers burst into the kids’ bedrooms and shoot them in their sleep with tranquilizer darts. Things seem to be going according to plan until they run into this girl…

who sinks through her bed and the floor, then escapes by running through a couple of walls. That’s right, it’s Kitty Pryde, although she’s played by a different actress than in the first movie.

In the kitchen, Wolverine has been alerted by the sound of booted feet and uses his claws to dispatch the first soldier he sees. Jackman actually tries to play Wolverine’s berserker rage here a little bit, forcing himself to calm down before asking if Bobby is all right.

Things get worse for the assault team when they burst into the room of a girl who emits a high-pitched scream that shatters windows and wakes up everybody left in the school (for you comics fans playing Mutant Bingo, this is Siryn, Banshee’s daughter). She’s soon knocked out by tranq darts, but before she can be kidnapped away, this guy shows up.

He’s Colossus. I wish he had a bigger role, not only because this effect looks awesome, but also because he was a central member of the new X-Men from their introduction in Giant-Size X-Men #1.

After defeating the soldiers, Colossus, transformed back into his human form as Peter Rasputin, grabs the unconscious Siryn and leads the other kids to a secret panel where they can escape. Wolverine meets him there, after killing a half-dozen or so soldiers. He hands Peter the unconscious TV kid and tells him to protect the younger kids. Bye-bye, Colossus.

Meanwhile, Bobby has grabbed Pyro to search for Rogue. They find her and try to escape, but find their way blocked by soldiers. Things look bad for them until Wolverine leaps down from a balcony.

Much of Wolverine’s action in this sequence seems to be a play on his similar battle with agents of the Hellfire Club in X-Men issue #133 during John Byrne’s run. But for all the men he kills, there is never a drop of blood on either his claws or his clothes.

Wolverine sends the kids down another secret tunnel and stays behind to fight a rear-guard action, when the soldiers are told to stand down by Stryker. And Stryker knows Wolverine.

He taunts Logan about his forgotten past and implies he has the answers Wolverine seeks. But before Wolverine can push him for more details, Bobby throws an ice wall between them (Rogue begged Bobby to turn back and help Logan). Wolverine escapes with the three teens in Cyclops’s car. Wolverine decides to head to Boston to link up with Storm and Jean. Bobby mentions that his parents live there.

Back at the mansion, Stryker’s men use a special machine to bypass the security on Cerebro. It seems as if the attack on the students was just a feint to cover this, their real objective. Hmmm…

Meanwhile, the prison guard we saw beating up on Magneto last week is drinking away his troubles in a bar. On the TV, a couple of talking heads are debating the mutant menace, and check out who one of those talking heads is.

Hank McCoy, also known as Beast, one of the founding members of the original X-Men. The actor here really looks a lot like the Hank McCoy of the comics., although this moment will later become out of continuity for the movies, since it will be established in X-Men: First Class that McCoy became his blue-furred version back in the 60’s. But then again, there was that brief run of Amazing Adventures which first introduced the blue-furred Beast, in which he would don a latex mask to look like his former human self. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here.

But back to the bar, where the guard meets an amazing-looking woman in a short, blue, lizard-skin dress who calls herself Grace.

The meta-joke here is that this is Rebecca Romijn, appearing on camera sans her Mystique make-up to play Mystique-in-disguise. She lures the guard into the bathroom, but instead of sex, he just passes out from the drugs she slipped into his beer. Then she injects his buttocks with  a huge syringe containing what looks like liquid metal.

Professor X wakes up in a grungy underground base at Alkali Lake, the place where Xavier sent Wolverine.  And the sickly green of the walls certainly matches the creepy green of Wolverine’s memories. Stryker has fitted Xavier with a neural inhibitor to contain his mental powers. During their conversation, we learn that Stryker and Xavier have known each other for a long time; Stryker asked Xavier to cure his son of his mutation, but Xavier refused, saying mutation was not a disease.

Stryker plans to use Xavier to locate all the world’s mutants. Xavier refuses, so Stryker introduces him to his son, Jason, who can cast mental illusions into the minds of others. He has been lobotomized and is now wheelchair bound, like Xavier himself.

It is Jason’s brain which supplies the fluid Stryker used to control Magneto and Nightcrawler (Stryker himself ordered the hit on the President to authorize his mission) as well as his assistant Yuriko. For those playing along at home, Jason is a heavily-modified version of Mastermind (Jason Wyngarde), the mind-controlling mutant who facilitated Jean Grey’s  first transformation into Dark Phoenix.

In Boston, Wolverine and the teens enter Bobby Drake’s home. Bobby finds them clothes to replace their pajamas (and of course, peeks while Rogue is changing). Bobby’s parents arrive, making for an awkward situation.

Meanwhile, at the prison, a smiling guard (improbably happy considering he passed out in a bathroom and woke up without the beautiful blonde, but with an incredible ache in his ass) enters Magneto’s cell with breakfast. Magneto draws the excess metal in his bloodstream out through the poor guy’s pores…

Then uses the balls of metal to break the plastic walls of his cell and escape.

Back in Boston, Bobby is having an awkward “coming-out” discussion with his parents. It’s written so that you could replace the word  “mutant” with “gay” and the scene would still make perfect sense. That’s right, being gay is  a superpower! They should call it “coming out of the phone booth.”

Unfortunately, Bobby’s little brother isn’t happy with Bobby getting all the attention, so he calls the cops, which results in Wolverine getting shot in the head. Without adult supervision, Pyro suddenly turns into the world’s biggest delinquent and fries the cops.

But like Wolverine’s bloodless killing of the soldiers, Pyro’s fire in the cops’ faces just results in a little singing of their uniforms. Before he can seriously hurt anybody, Rogue absorbs his powers and douses his flames. And luckily, the X-Jet arrives at just that moment so they can make a quick getaway. Poor Bobby gets one last puppy-dog look at his family huddling in the window, terrified.

At Alkali Lake, Professor X is trapped in Jason’s illusions. Convinced that his students have disappeared, he decides to track them down using Cerebro.

As the X-Jet nears the mansion, it is intercepted by two F-16 fighter jets. The X-Men are ordered to land, but Storm says screw that and rabbits, summoning a flock of tornadoes to cover their escape.

But one of the jets manages to lock its missiles and fire. Storm, who has been coolly outflying military jet pilots, suddenly turns useless so that Jean can have her turn at the Wheel of Awesome. Her eyes flash with red flame as her power surges and she destroys one of the missiles.

That leaves one missile to hit the X-Jet. Rogue (who is still no damn good at working seat belts) is sucked out of the plane. Nightcrawler teleports out and saves her, but like an idiot, he brings her back into the plane, which is crashing.

Until Magneto stops it just feet from crashing into the ground.

The X-Men call an uneasy truce with Magneto as he fills them in on Stryker’s plans: to use Cerebro to locate and kill every mutant on Earth (remember last week when Xavier mentioned he could kill people with Cerebro if he concentrated hard enough?).

This middle, post-halfway lull is often boring in films, but I like this one, because of all the character interaction. Rogue thanks Nightcrawler for saving her life, and for once, he actually smiles.

Nightcrawler was always one of my favorite X-Men, but he was also kind of a wasted character in the comics. Cockrum and Claremont could never agree on how to play him (Cockrum liked him as a swashbuckling Errol Flynn fan, while Claremont seemed to like making him a tortured Catholic), and John Byrne just never seemed to like him at all.

His appearance here is similarly uneven. The self-inflicted scars of “angelic symbols” look pretty awesome, but I don’t like what they say about his character (not to mention the fact that actor Alan Cumming refused to do any more movies because the make-up was such a pain to apply).

In the comics, of course, he was furry, like Beast (hence his horrid Claremont-inflicted nickname of “fuzzy-elf”–GAH!), but I don’t mind them losing the fur. Cumming does a really good job of putting life into the character, and the teleportation effects are awesome, but I kind of wish we’d gotten more of this fun, cocky Nightcrawler and not the hangdog, rosary-counting dude we’ve been seeing up to now.

Jean uses her telepathy to read Nightcrawler’s mind and locate the base, and then has a brief moment with Wolverine where he tries to seduce her, but she chooses Cyclops definitively, once and for all. Nightcrawler and Mystique, fellow blue-skinned mutants, share a brief moment (made only a little icky by the fact that in the comics, Mystique is Nightcrawler’s mother), and then Wolverine has a moment of sexy time with Jean in his tent, only to discover it’s Mystique having a bit of fun. She also shapeshifts to Storm and Rogue before leaving, and who thought that the way to Mystique’s heart was via claws through the abdomen?

With their plane repaired, the group flies north to Alkali Lake. Magneto and Mystique taunt Rogue (having nearly killed her last movie), but Magneto subtly tries to recruit Pyro by telling him he is a “god among insects.” And I like the little touch of Magneto asking Pyro his “real name” after Pyro introduces himself as John.

They arrive at Alkali Lake and we get the obligatory “sand table” sequence (in this case, it’s a 3-D holographic display) setting out the terrain of the climax.

It’s kind of half-assed, though, in that it merely sets up the first stage of the assault instead of describing the whole plan. Wolverine volunteers to do the initial breach, but Magneto insists that Mystique should do it. Who will win?

Join us next week to find out.

Since Out of the Vault was late, I thought I’d drag this by a day as well, to give people time to read the other thing. Continuing our coverage of the X-Men series of films, we visit the second film in the series, X2. Posters and ads for the movie actually called the film X2: X-Men United, but as you can see, that is not the title that appears on screen.

It begins much like the first film, with the same trailing fade of the X in 20th Century Fox, followed by Professor Ex-avier giving a voiceover about mutants. This time, though, instead of following nerve pathways inside a human body for the titles, we follow electronic circuits until we arrive inside the big spherical Cerebro chamber. Could this be an omen for the movie?

You know what you need in a good sequel? Bigger scope. The first film centered around a threat to New York City. This film opens in the White House, so it does indeed look as if everything will be bigger this time around. Some tourists are getting the official tour of the White House when one man breaks away from the tour and wanders the hallways alone. A Secret Service agent confronts him and gets the idea he’s up to no good when he notices the man’s pasty white, scarred face and, um, tail.

Cue the action scene! The intruder is a fierce fighter, bounding around the hallways on all fours, bouncing off walls, kicking the stuffing out of Secret Service agents, and that’s not even counting the cool thing. He teleports in a burst of dark vapor.

For those in the know about the comics, this guy is obviously Nightcrawler, but I’ll talk in more detail about him next week. He takes down dozens of agents while fighting his way into the Oval Office, a whirlwind of fists and CG smoke. Finally, there’s just the President, whom Nightcrawler pins to the desk and prepares to stab with a knife he pulls from his boot.

But he is shot in the arm by a lone conscious Secret Service agent and teleports away,  leaving behind the knife with a “Mutant Freedom NOW!” banner attached. And I know I just said I would wait till next week, but one thing about Nightcrawler is that, in the comics, he teleports in a burst of smoke and brimstone, so I wish that, after he wastes all the agents in the Oval Office, there were a haze of smoke in the air. It would really add to the atmosphere, so to speak.

Ah, well. Meanwhile, Wolverine is in Canada visiting that abandoned base that Professor X sent him to. It’s still abandoned, not to mention in pieces and the pieces buried under snow. So Wolverine turns around and comes home.

Where the X-Men are not. They are leading a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Cyclops is concerned for Jean; she was affected by the mutant machine on Liberty Island in the first movie, somehow (perhaps also by her unauthorized use of Cerebro). Her powers are stronger, and she’s having trouble controlling them.

One guy who’s not having trouble controlling his powers is John Allerdyce, a.k.a. Pyro. We saw him briefly in the first film (played by a different actor), where he made a ball of fire in class to show off for Rogue. This time, he’s screwing around with a couple of human bullies, until one of them takes his lighter. So he sets the guy on fire. He’s a loose cannon. That’s him on the right, with Rogue and Bobby Drake, a.k.a. Iceman. The dude in the jean jacket at center left is just one of the bullies.

Professor X uses his mental powers to freeze everyone not in his group and scolds Pyro for using his powers foolishly. Then they all see a TV news broadcast that the President was attacked by a mutant. Time to go.

Back in the Oval Office, the President is being visited by William Stryker (Brian Cox, who does a really good villainous turn here), whose job description seems to vary from scene to scene. He is referred to as Colonel, and the President mentions Stryker’s “department” which investigates mutants and also devised Magneto’s plastic prison.

Stryker briefs the President and Senator Kelly (who died in the first film and is now being impersonated by Magneto’s former henchwoman, Mystique) on a sinister school for mutants that has a secret airplane that comes up out of the basketball court. The President authorizes a raid, but only to detain. “Senator Kelly” tries to dissuade Stryker and his hot, but emotionless bodyguard Yuriko, from their mission, but fails.

At the school, Bobby and Rogue are getting romantic when Rogue is distracted by the sound of a motorcycle. Wolverine’s back! Bobby is chopper-blocked! Storm and Jean pass by long enough to say that they’re on their way to Boston to pick up the mutant who attacked the President.

Oh, BTW, Magneto? Still in prison and reading The Once and Future King, not that that’s foreshadowing or anything. He is assaulted by a guard and held down while Stryker comes in and drips some mysterious drug onto a weird neck “nipple.”

Magneto enters an almost hypnotic trance, and Stryker interrogates him some more about Xavier’s school and Cerebro in particular.

Back at the school, Wolverine catches Xavier just as he is firing up Cerebro. In a slightly different visual approach from the first movie, we see everyone in the world represented by glowing dots on a map, and then the normals are filtered out, leaving only the mutants as red dots.

Xavier mentions that he can kill people by concentrating on them too hard while in Cerebro. Good to know. And then we see him tracking a mysterious dot that is skipping its way up the Eastern Seaboard, finally coming to rest in Boston. It’s Nightcrawler!

But wait: I thought he had already tracked Nightcrawler down. Otherwise, why did he send Jean and Storm to Boston? Anyway, Xavier asks Wolverine to babysit at the school while he and Cyclops go to visit “an old friend.”

In Washington, Mystique drops her Senator Kelly disguise and breaks into Stryker’s offices after hours by assuming the form of Yuriko. She breaks into Stryker’s computer by mimicking his voiceprint, and opens up a world of Easter Eggs.

Seriously, this single scene has more hidden Marvel comics Easter Eggs than any other Marvel film. For instance, this list of names that consists entirely of characters from the various X-comics.

I could detail the characters on this list, but if you’re a fan, you already know them, and if you’re not, you won’t care. This list is not what Mystique’s after, anyway. She pulls up a list of guards at the plastic prison (including B. Singer and T. DeSanto, the film’s director and one of its exec. producers) and copies a personnel file of the sadistic one we saw before.

But then she notices a file (among many other files which are all named after entities in the Marvel Universe) named “Cerebro.” She opens it up and sees plans for a second Cerebro being built at Alkali Lake, the “abandoned” base Wolverine just left. And just to show you how quickly things have changed in ten years, instead of loading all this data onto a flash drive, she prints out hard copies and smuggles them out under the nose of a just-returned Yuriko by disguising herself as a janitor taking out the trash.

In Boston, Jean and Storm find Nightcrawler hiding out in a cathedral. Storm flushes him out with a lightning bolt, and Jean immobilizes him with her telekinesis (which also apparently shuts down his teleportation). He tells them that he remembers the attack vaguely, but could not control his actions. And just by coincidence, I’m sure, he has a weird neck nipple, just like Magneto.

Speaking of Magneto, Xavier has come to the prison to ask him if he knows anything about the attack on the President. And look, we get a “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo by the director himself, pushing Xavier’s wheelchair into the antechamber.

Magneto taunts Xavier about the coming backlash to the attack, and also about Wolverine. It seems that both Xavier and Magneto know more about Wolverine than they’ve ever mentioned to him.

But we won’t be getting any details, because the chamber is pumped full of knock-out gas. Cyclops, waiting in the antechamber, tries to help, but before he can mount a rescue, he is knocked silly by Yuriko, who is as tough as Wolverine, apparently.

And speaking of Wolverine, he’s restlessly pacing the halls of the school. He runs into a kid watching TV and changing the channels by blinking at them, then he goes into the kitchen to bond with Iceman over a beverage that is sadly not beer. Meanwhile, the TV-watching kid meets a mysterious figure wearing night vision goggles who shoots him with tranquilizer darts.

The raid on Xavier’s school has begun! Join us next week to see how that works out. And join us Saturday for Out of the Vault, when I take a look at God Loves, Man Kills, the graphic novel that this film is (very loosely) based on.

Now we’re into the big finish of Brian Singer’s 2000 adaptation of X-Men, although the term “big” may not apply so much. When we left off, Rogue had been kidnapped by Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, and Professor Ex-Javier had been rendered comatose trying to track her down via a sabotaged Cerebro. But Jean figures out where they’re going.

Which turns out to be the Statue of Liberty. We’ve seen Toad working on some big apparatus he was painting light green, and now we see it peeking out from under a tarp on a boat Mystique is piloting to Liberty Island as Toad and Sabretooth clear the island of guards.

Cyclops explains the set-up to the climax via this neat 3-D tactical display that’s like an animated pinboard.

The diplomats of the U.N. Summit are meeting on Ellis Island. Magneto will set up his mutation machine on nearby Liberty Island and activate it, sending a wave of ultimately lethal mutation energy toward the diplomats. In the process, he will also catch much of Manhattan Island in the radius, killing millions. Stakes and geography explained, let’s get to the fighting.

The X-Men take off in their special stealth jet. Wolverine has been issued a special leather X-suit like the others, which he’s uncomfortable with, leading Cyclops to joke about yellow spandex just to troll the die-hard fanboys. They fly the jet in low and Storm rolls in a fogbank to disguise their final approach. Cyclops figures out that the mutation machine is hidden in a replacement torch (his first clue is probably the original torch sitting on the ground near where they disembark). One wonders how Magneto got it up there without anyone noticing.

The Mutastic Four (and seriously, why only four? I’m guessing budget, but still…) enter the lobby at the statue’s base, and there’s a brief gag with Wolverine setting off the metal detector, then giving Cyclops the middle claw.

One thing to notice here: Wolverine’s outfit has gold piping, which is missing from the others. Is this just to let everybody know who the real star is, or what?

Moments later, Wolverine smells trouble and heads off to find it. When he returns, another Wolverine attacks him, and the battle is on! One of the Wolverines is obviously Mystique in disguise, who learns the hard way that Wolverine’s claws can cut through anything, including cheap imitation claws.

They dub Mystique’s voice in for that shriek. It’s awesome and disturbing. Mystique manages to close off a heavy metal door, isolating her with Wolverine  (she obviously still doesn’t realize just how dangerous he is). Meanwhile, before Jean, Cyclops and Storm can pursue, Toad attacks them.

A word about Toad: he was the most useless frickin’ villain in the history of comics.  Seriously, he was so obviously comic relief and nothing but, he even dressed like a jester.

But the Toad in this movie is actually pretty awesome, managing to single-handedly take down Cyclops, Jean and Storm, at least temporarily. He kicks Cyclops into another room, then slams the door shut with his tongue, spits a glob of fast-hardening mucus onto Jean’s face, smothering her, and kicks Storm down an open elevator shaft. Then he strikes a cocky martial arts pose with this metal pole…

just to remind the audience that he was also this guy.

Which just goes to show you how times have changed. They purposely associated their movie with The Phantom Menace as a way to seem cooler. Seriously.

Even worse, as Cyclops blasts his way back into the lobby and saves Jean, Storm manages to waste this moment of complete awesome, including a really cool way to make the Cockrum blank eyes from the comics work in live action…

with the weakest line of dialogue in the entire movie (even including the most cringeworthy lines from Professor Ex-position).

Meanwhile, Mystique is kicking all kinds of Wolverine ass. She’s incredibly skilled and nimble, and just plain ruthless. It’s actually pretty awesome how completely she outclasses him. She totally deserves to win this fight. It’s just her bad luck that Wolverine is A) pretty much completely indestructible (not just because of his powers, but by fan fiat), and 2) able to recognize her scent even when she’s disguised. Wolverine stabs her through the gut and rejoins the group.

They make it to the top of the statue when Wolverine remembers that his metal skeleton makes him worse than helpless against a magnetic guy. Next thing you know, all four have been rendered helpless by Magneto’s awesome powers. After a last plea from the X-Men that he not go through with his plan, Magneto leaves Sabretooth to watch them and rises regally into the air for the culmination of his scheme.

Singer and McKellen do just about everything right with Magneto. McKellen’s performance is wonderful, mouthing pious justifications for his every evil action, while you can see on his face that he is really acting out of a long-standing and bitter grudge. And he knows it.

Meanwhile, as Sargon mentioned in comments a couple of weeks ago, Singer’s handling of Magneto’s powers, using them in completely natural and low-key ways, makes him that much more impressive a villain. He doesn’t have to huff and puff; he flicks a finger, and houses fall down.

As Magneto prepares to activate the machine, Wolverine breaks free by stabbing his claws through his own body and has a big battle atop the Statue of Liberty with Sabretooth. The fight is actually a little disappointing. Compared to the mostly awesome fight with Mystique, the battle with Sabretooth is perfunctory and clumsy, existing mainly for one eye-kick shot featuring a kind of bullet-time effect that has not aged gracefully.

Wolverine manages to defeat Sabretooth with the help of the others as Magneto is activating the machine. The final confrontation is set up so that all four X-Men are required to save Rogue and defeat Magneto. But not before the stresses of the machine put a certain iconic white streak in Rogue’s hair, so that she will more closely resemble her comic book counterpart.

When all is done, Rogue is not breathing, so Wolverine touches her face with his bare hand. Nothing happens at first, and he is sure that she is dead. But then his wounds, both the self-inflicted ones and the ones from Sabretooth’s claws, open up, and Wolverine collapses as Rogue is coming to.

And now there’s nothing left but setting up the sequel. Professor X tells Wolverine about an abandoned military base in Canada that might hold clues to his origin. Wolverine steals Cyclops’s motorcycle again when he leaves. And Xavier next visits Magneto, where he is being held in a plastic prison, which Magneto vows will not hold him for long.

Will it? We’ll see next week.

Looking at the movie as a whole, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was great to see these characters and their powers played straight in a (mostly) serious and adult fashion, with obvious respect for the source material. It worked for the most part, and ushered in a wave of superhero movies with big budgets and impressive action. Jackman and McKellen get real star-making turns here, and the superpowers are handled with real aplomb.

And the villainous plot, to turn the visiting world leaders into mutants, giving them a vested interest in the fair treatment of mutants worldwide, is brilliant. The old adage that the villain actually believes he’s the hero of the story is almost perfectly realized here.

On the minus side, some of the scripting and performances don’t measure up as well. The computer animated effects don’t always work well. But most of all, I think what disappoints me is the lack of scope. Magneto’s plot has scope, but the action set-pieces, from the perfunctory fight in the snow to the brief battle at the train station, to the final encounter at the Statue of Liberty, feel small and constrained. I’m sure they were facing a tight budget, but there are movies that manage to feel bigger than their budget, which this one doesn’t, at least for me.

But come back next week for the sequel, and we’ll see if the problems get rectified.