CBR: Mutant Cinema: The Rise of the X-Films

[CBR News]

CBR's Timothy Callahan sits down with "Variety" writer Tom McLean, author of the
new book "Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen," to talk
about the book and whether or not the third X movie is really so bad.


Full article here.

[vcassel]

CBR's Timothy Callahan sits down with "Variety" writer Tom McLean, author of the
new book "Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen," to talk
about the book and whether or not the third X movie is really so bad.


Full article here.

i don't need to read that article in order to tell you as a fact, yes, as a fact and not an opinion, that x-men 3 sucks and nobody liked it. if anyone here says they do like it or something snotty like "well, it's just your opinion" it is a fact that they are lying. end of thread. good night everybody!!!

[Acathla]

I love all the X-men movies, including 3.

[SlightlyMad]

I did like X-Men 3. Not as much as the first 2 (which weren't perfect either) but thought it was an enjoyable popcorn flick, not worth over-analysis or getting upset about.

[Psistorm4472]

X-Men 3 was bad. Not because of the director, or lack of Bryan Singer, but because of a script that tried to handle too many themes and ideas at once and ended up handling none of them successfully.
At all.
It was also bad because
1) Jean NEVER would have killed Scott
2) Psylocke is NOT a villain. Nor is Jamie Madrox, Multiple Man.
3) Wolverine's healing factor should NOT have been able to handle what Jean was dishing out there in the end
4) The story completely ruined Jean as a heroic character because she should have sacrificed HERSELF like she did in the comic book, not beg Wolverine to kill her.
5) Once again, Storm was waaaaay out of character
6) ...
Aw, heck, I could go on all day. Needless to say, it was bad.
Any enjoyment I could have derived from it being a "summer blockbuster popcorn film" was diminished by all of the severe flaws.

[StoneGold]

X-Men 3 was bad. Not because of the director, or lack of Bryan Singer, but because of a script that tried to handle too many themes and ideas at once and ended up handling none of them successfully.
At all.
It was also bad because
1) Jean NEVER would have killed Scott
2) Psylocke is NOT a villain. Nor is Jamie Madrox, Multiple Man.
3) Wolverine's healing factor should NOT have been able to handle what Jean was dishing out there in the end
4) The story completely ruined Jean as a heroic character because she should have sacrificed HERSELF like she did in the comic book, not beg Wolverine to kill her.
5) Once again, Storm was waaaaay out of character
6) ...
Aw, heck, I could go on all day. Needless to say, it was bad.
Any enjoyment I could have derived from it being a "summer blockbuster popcorn film" was diminished by all of the severe flaws.

And why are you wrong on pretty much all those counts? Because this was the third movie, not the fifth decade of comics.

[Flinkman]

i loved the third movie, i really don't give a damn if the rest of fandom didn't.

And why are you wrong on pretty much all those counts? Because this was the third movie, not the fifth decade of comics.

*claps* exactly, NONE of the movies (even the beloved X2) are literal adaptations of the comics, so the argument of X-Men 3 accuracy has no gravity with me.

[Psistorm4472]

And why are you wrong on pretty much all those counts? Because this was the third movie, not the fifth decade of comics.

The only thing I'm "wrong" about is having faith that writers would accurately reflect and base their characters from the actual source material.
Silly me.

[JdRavnos]

The only thing I'm "wrong" about is having faith that writers would accurately reflect and base their characters from the actual source material.
Silly me.

The first two films took an awful number of liberties as well. While I'm not going to defend X3 as being great, in fact I agree with you that they took on too many themes and ideas, but the other arguements you made were just nitpicky. And they reminded me of the claims back in the day that organic webbing was proof that that Raimi didn't get Spider-Man and the whole film was going to end up being crap because of it.

[Nevets F]

I absolutely loved the third X-Men movie.

[Mr.EZ]

I own a dvd of X-Men 3 and when I'm bored enough to watch it, I only skip to scenes with Grammar as The Beast. The rest of the movie is trash.

[StoneGold]

The only thing I'm "wrong" about is having faith that writers would accurately reflect and base their characters from the actual source material.
Silly me.

Yes, silly you. Have you ever seen a movie adapted from a book? They tend to take liberties with the characters, often for expediency's sake, sometimes to make the movie flow better as it only has two hours or so to tell a story, other times because it just doesn't care.

It's why the phrase "the book was better than the movie" exists. That said, doing a lavish recreation of the original stories doesn't necessarily make things any better. At the end of the day, the trick is just to make a movie that doesn't suck.

[Cyke]

Cut the amount of characters in half, expand upon the stories of the new X-Men (like Colossus and Shadowcat), increase Bobby's involvement as a natural evolution of his role in X2 to about the size of Beast's story, and then maybe something resembling a story would do it.

Also, just rename all the movies as Wolverine and the X-Men: 1, 2, and 3.

[howyadoin]

i don't need to read that article in order to tell you as a fact, yes, as a fact and not an opinion, that x-men 3 sucks and nobody liked it. if anyone here says they do like it or something snotty like "well, it's just your opinion" it is a fact that they are lying. end of thread. good night everybody!!!

And... scene.

[Psistorm4472]

That said, doing a lavish recreation of the original stories doesn't necessarily make things any better. At the end of the day, the trick is just to make a movie that doesn't suck.

Which in my opinion, they failed to do. For the reasons I mentioned above.