| Directed by | Bryan Singer |
|---|---|
| Produced by |
|
| Screenplay by | Simon Kinberg |
| Story by |
|
RATING: *** (out of four)
Let's start at the beginning - which seems appropriate for a time travel tale, doesn't it? And yes, there be spoilers here, but think of them as pieces of a disassembled jigsaw puzzle. If you want to see 'em assembled, you can always go here. Or, better yet, your friendly neighborhood Cineplex.
In a dystopian future, sentient robots known as Sentinels are exterminating mutants and oppressing humans, since humans harbor the genes that lead to mutant offspring. A small band of mutant survivors manage to evade the Sentinels thanks to the powers of Kitty Pryde, who has the ability to project a person's consciousness back in time to deliver warnings.
This is to say, the Sentinels are exterminating the same small band of mutant survivors over and over and over again, and Ms. Pryde - or "Shadowcat" in the comics - keeps quantum-leaping them back to life. Seems like a monumental hassle of a lifestyle, until you realize that the alternative is death.
Also, if that world looks an awful lot like those of the Terminator and Matrix franchises, and the X-Men's solution bore an uncanny similarity to that of the former, go to the head of the class and collect your gold good-noodle star. But hey, there's no such thing as a boring time travel story. Confusing, sure, but this one didn't have that problem.
One minor issue I had with the future prelude is how the mytharc gets from "our" world as we saw it at the end of last year's The Wolverine, to this post-apocalyptic wasteland. I'll freely and publicly disclose here that I never read the comic books, so my knowledge of them is backfilled from the movies and corresponding Wikipedia pages and so forth. I know the Sentinels were depicted in the comic books, but with the exception of the "Danger Room" scene in X-Men III: The Last Stand - that name of which, in light of DOFP, seems even sillier - they've never been mentioned or even hinted at. I'd have thought that if the Sentinel program had been around as long as Roe v. Wade, there'd have been a lot bigger impact on society a lot sooner. I mean, Skynet only took a matter of days to take over the world after it was brought online; why did it take the Sentinels over forty years to make their move?
Yes, yes, I know, the movie wasn't about that. But I dislike fait accomplis. I have this annoying habit of wanting to know "why?". So sue me.
Kitty's group rendezvous with Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier in a monastery in China. They hatch a plan to send Wolverine's consciousness back in time to prevent Mystique from murdering Bolivar Trask, the lead designer of the Sentinels.
Here is an example of not having read the comics being an advantage. In the comics, it's Kitty Pryde who astrally projects herself across time to stop Mystique. So the notion of Wolverine making the trip probably grates on the hardcore X-Men geeks. As for me, my cynical side acknowledges the inevitability of Wolverine being the choice - Hugh Jackman is the face of the X-Men franchise and is the only character to be in every single one of its releases, so who else was it going to be? But it also makes sense within the confines of the story. Kitty can send people's consciousnesses back a few hours or days or even weeks, but the process is arduous and physically taxing on the time traveler. But half a century? Only Wolverine, with his instantaneous self-healing ability, could possibly survive it.
Of course, logically, Kitty shouldn't be able to generate that much phasing energy, at least without endangering her own life, but then Wolverine shouldn't have had adamantium claws, since they were chopped off by the Silver Samurai in The Wolverine, unless he underwent a really hardcore manicure. Cinema Sins, admittedly, but not ones sufficiently egregious that they can't be overlooked for the sake of a good story, which this one is.
Trask's assassination will make him a martyr, Mystique will be captured and her mutant powers will be reverse-engineered and used to create the formidable Sentinels of the future. Professor X advises Wolverine to seek out his younger self for aid.
I'm not a big believer in historical "focal points". As Hank McCoy (Beast) acknowledged in one scene, I agree with the idea that time is immutable, like a river. You can toss a big rock into it, it'll make a big splash and send out big ripples, but the river itself will keep right on flowing in the same direction. Remember how Sarah Connor thought assassinating Miles Bennett Dyson, the inventor of Skynet in her timeline, would prevent Judgment Day in Terminator II? In the end, Dyson died and all his notes and research and proto-Skynet tech was destroyed along with him. Yet in Terminator III we saw that Skynet was simply invented by somebody or somebodies else a few years later. There was no "focal point"; it was an inevitable trend leading to an inevitable end, with only the details and timing being variable. So, who's to say, in the absence of Trask's assassination, that Sentinels wouldn't have been invented and deployed anyway? In the altered 1973 we saw precisely that possibility arise as Trask simply made his sales pitch to the Soviets and ChiComms after he was turned down by Congress, and I doubt they'd have turned him down as well.
Wolverine wakes up in 1973 in his younger body and travels to the X-Mansion, where he encounters the young Hank McCoy and a disheveled Xavier. His school has failed and most of his original X-Men are dead, and this has left him a broken man. He has also lost his telepathic powers through taking serum which allows him to walk again.
Actually, Xavier's school didn't fail as such. As revealed by Beast, most or all of his students were drafted during the post-Gulf of Tonkin Vietnam escalation. Which seems rather odd given that "anonymity will be our first line of defense," as he told Moira McTaggart at the end of First Class. Evidently the government knew where to find them.
I had surmised that Xavier had used his mutation itself to heal his legs - "mental fun with DNA," more or less - so to see that it was a "serum" (little nod to Captain America, that) of McCoy's invention that restored Charles' lower extremities was a little disappointing, although I suppose it conjoined with explaining how McCoy can turn his Beast persona on and off at will (rather like Bruce Banner/Hulk in The Avengers). That the serum "deactivates" Xavier's telepathy seems kind of arbitrary. But you can't really blame him for choosing legs over Megamind; problem is, he really isn't using either one.
It's the paths taken by the two people closest to him - Mystique and Magneto - that broke Xavier. In a way, it was inevitable; naïvely optimistic idealists always have their day of reckoning with reality sooner or later. Xavier thought that by saving the world from Sebastian Shaw's plot to cleanse the world in nuclear fire, his mutants could win over the rest of humanity; he found out very differently. He thought he could win Erik Lehnsherr over to his idealistic vision of human-mutant peace; he and his spine found out very differently. But the departure of Raven Darkholme - his de facto sister - and transformation into an assassin was the dagger from which he never recovered, leaving him a bitter, disheveled recluse whiling away his days in his dilapidated home.
Hmm; a bitter, disheveled recluse, whiling away his days in his dilapidated home. Wow, that's hitting a little too close to home, isn't it? Moving right along....
Wolverine convinces Xavier to free Magneto — who was accused of murdering John F. Kennedy (a charge he denies, stating that Kennedy was himself a mutant) — from a prison cell beneath The Pentagon. They do this with the help of Peter Maximoff, a mutant who can move blindingly fast.
If you go here, you'll learn that it was Mystique (impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald, natch) who fired the bullets from the School Book Depository. Whether Magneto steered them into JFK or not is conjectural; his line about Kennedy being a mutant is just silly, and I didn't buy it any more than Xavier did. I mean, how would Lehnsherr have known this, besides JFK's kid brother being a manatee? And if he did, why wouldn't he have passed this little nugget of information on to his comely blue nudist? Would have saved him ten years of deep - and I mean deep - incarceration.
Of course, it's baffling why either Mystique or Magneto could have thought that a mutant assassinating the POTUS could ever have positive repercussions for mutantkind. More on that later.
The scenes with Maximoff - aka Quicksilver - were a highlight of the film, and contained the "Easter egg" of his line about his mother "knowing some guy like [Magneto] once" - Quicksilver being, in the comic books, the son of, yes, Magneto.
Meanwhile, in Saigon, Mystique prevents a young William Stryker from appropriating a group of mutant American GIs, including Havok, for Trask's research. Mystique investigates Trask Industries and discovers he has been capturing and experimenting on mutants, including some of her old comrades. Knowing that the assassination of Trask occurs in Paris, Xavier and Magneto board a private plane with Beast and Wolverine in order to intercept Mystique, although the two argue over abandoning each other.
Not really a "young" William Stryker, as this was the same time period in which he approached Logan and Victor Creed (aka Sabertooth) about his "special team, with special privileges". Perhaps Stryker was capturing mutants for his own experiments at Three Mile Island in addition to Bolivar Trask's?
Mystique's infiltration of Trask's headquarters and his autopsy files shows us what happened to Tempest, Azazel, Banshee, Emma Frost, etc. No wonder he and Stryker got along so well. Indeed, in one scene Stryker asks the same question of Trask that Stryker himself is asked by General Munson at "The Island" five years later: "You really hate mutants, don't you?" Trask's answer is quite similar: A claim not to hate them, even while he's trying to wipe them out, with the additional proviso that this can bring the entire human world together "as a species". See what happens when you get brainwashed by evolutionist propaganda?
The core of the story is embodied in the dialogue between Xavier and Lehnsherr on that flight to Paris. It's like they picked up right where they left off on that Cuban beach.
Recall that at the end of First Class, Xavier's belief in the attainability of human-mutant peace is shaken, but not yet shattered, whereas Lehnsherr's certitude about the inevitability of a human-mutant conflict to the death is irretrievably reinforced. Still, the Cuban Missile Crisis events send them in divergent directions. Magneto (and, by extension, Mystique) essentially makes his prophecy self-fulfilling by waging the "inter-species" war that is not, in fact, inevitable, and provoking and/or exacerbating the genocidal actions of a Trask and a Stryker. Xavier, by contrast, turns those emotions inward, against himself, as depression, and gives up on life. The ironic commonality is that in taking those different paths, both Professor X and Magneto failed in what they both claimed to want to do: protect their fellow mutants. Yet each blamed the other for that failure, and continued to do so for the rest of their lives as they pursued their own respective philosophies, and thus "all those years wasted fighting each other".
They're friends, yet they're enemies. They want the same end, but not by the same means. They're both extremists, with the truth somewhere in the middle. It's probably the richest, most complex, most fascinating relationship I've ever seen in movies, TV, or literature. And James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender absolutely nail all of it on that plane ride to Paris.
Xavier takes all his self-pity and self-loathing and directs it at Lehnsherr ("You took the things that meant the most to me!"). Lehnsherr, disgusted by it and by Xavier's self-absorption that can't see anybody else's pain but his own, throws it right back in Xavier's face ("Maybe you should have fought harder for them!") with a vehemence that literally knocks Xavier on his ass as he goes on to tick off the names of all the mutants, all his friends, that he's lost over the preceding decade, which he believes backs up what he told Xavier from the start: There's a war coming, and mutants should fight it pre-emptively, by any means necessary.
But as usual, Magneto goes too far.
In Paris, the Americans and Vietnamese are negotiating the end to the Vietnam War. Mystique impersonates a Vietnamese general to infiltrate a meeting with Trask. As she is about to kill Trask, Wolverine, Xavier, Magneto and Hank arrive. To guarantee her powers can never be used for the Sentinels, Magneto tries to kill Mystique, who flees out a window. A fight on the street ensues, in front of onlookers and television cameras.
Well, of course he does. Because naturally, Magneto would be able to vaporize her remains after he blew her head off. Or so he'd have had to hope, because otherwise he'd have spared Trask the trouble of having to kill Mystique himself plus dropping her body right into his Mini-Me lap. As it is, he "bends" another bullet into her leg, thus giving further lie to the "I was trying to save Kennedy because he was a fellow mutant" whopper, and providing Trask with a blood sample to get started on his Sentinel upgrade. And of course, the whole fracas takes place before the entire planet at the Vietnam peace talks, so if the general human population didn't know about mutants before, they sure as shinola do now, and in the worst possible light. Gee, maybe there's something to Xavier's "anonymity as the first line of defense" reasoning after all.
Predictably, it all goes to hell after that.
Although Trask is saved, the world is horrified by the existence of mutants. President Richard Nixon approves Trask's Sentinel program and arranges an unveiling in Washington, D.C.
Just as an aside: Earlier Trask was lobbying Congress for Sentinel funding; they turned him down. Since Congress, constitutionally speaking, has the power of the purse, what would have been the point of lobbying President Nixon about it? He'd have had no constitutional authority to "approve" the Sentinel program because it would still have required a congressional appropriation. Which was why Trask was lobbying Congress in the first place. And they turned him down.
Another thought: Doesn't the fact of Trask promptly taking his proposal to America's enemies render him a traitor and a fool, since, as I observed above, it's not difficult to see Moscow and/or Beijing turning the Sentinels to uses other than mutant-hunting? And does the irony not get excruciating when you realize that Trask could have brought about the very end result - a global nuclear holocaust - that Sebastian Shaw was seeking as the entrance to a new mutant-dominated order in the first place?
At the mansion, Xavier eschews his regular serum dose to regain his powers. Through Wolverine, Xavier communes with his future self and is inspired to struggle for human-mutant peace once again. He uses Cerebro to track Mystique en route to Washington.
The final step on young Xavier's path towards truly becoming Professor X. There's something to be said for having one's convictions and faith tested "by fire". If you come out the other side with your beliefs intact, they become "adamantiumized" - unbreakable and indestructible. Ditto, however, any accompanying errors and misconceptions. The scene between Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy is novel and, in its way, solipsistically inspiring. "I don't want your suffering! I don't want your future!" becomes "We need you to hope again" in a matter of a few minutes' screen time. But hope, in and of itself, is mainly about making oneself feel better, and can be taken to self-deluding ends. Which was the other side of "all those years wasted fighting each other".
Nixon unveils the Sentinel prototypes on the White House lawn. As a show of force, Magneto raises RFK Stadium and deposits it around the White House.
Even more awesome than when he moved the Golden Gate Bridge in Last Stand. Worth the price of admission all by itself.
He also commandeers the Sentinels and has them attack the crowd.
And if Magneto had limited it to that, he'd have achieved his objective. Make it look like the Sentinels malfunctioned and went berserk. Permanently discredit Trask before the whole world and minimize the chances of anybody else being able to pick up his work.
But...no.
Nixon and Trask are taken to a safe room, followed by a disguised Mystique. Xavier, Wolverine, and Beast try to stop Magneto. Magneto impales Wolverine with rebars and flings him into the Potomac River.
Completely gratuitous. There wasn't anything Beast could do, and Wolverine didn't have his adamantium claws yet, and couldn't so do a reprise (or would it be a preprise?) of his Sentinel beheading from the Danger Room scene in Last Stand. I guess it's like Wolverine observed about Lehnsherr on the flight to Paris: "So, you always were an asshole."
In 2023, the X-Men make their final stand as the Sentinels assault the monastery.
This, my friends, was a real "last stand". And graphic, after a fashion: Colossus gets ripped in half, Sunspot and Bishop immolated, Blink drawn & quartered, Iceman beheaded, Storm impaled and thrown off a cliff. Even Old Magneto was wounded. Kinda makes one wonder how the Sentinels would have taken out the "indestructible" Wolverine; did they have flaming adamantium swords?
And yet it wasn't quite a real last stand, since Shadowcat had to maintain Wolverine's mindlink to his past self for the plot to be resolved, which would save all of them (again). Or, in other words, a cheat, and an additional jeopardy premise to add suspense to a climax that could only end one way. But such is the case in almost all time travel stories. This one was at least plausible, even if the Sentinel ships did look like gigantic electric shavers.
Pulling the safe room out of the White House, Magneto aims the television cameras at himself and prepares to kill the President with the whole world watching.
Not to poop on the party or anything, but isn't this what Mystique was attempting to do writ huge? If a mutant blowing away Bolivar Trask turned him into a martyr and humanity against mutantkind, wouldn't a mutant murdering the President of the United States in front of the entire world be the same thing magnified logarithmically? Heck, wasn't that the same thing - the Kennedy assassination - that started this whole process in the first place?
But one extremist had to set the stage for the other extremist to save the day and restore their crazy balance of insanity.
Disguised as the President, Mystique wounds him with a plastic gun and reveals her true form. Xavier persuades Mystique not to kill Trask and allows her and Magneto to flee. Mystique's interference is seen as a mutant rescue of the president; the Sentinel program is cancelled and Trask is arrested for selling military secrets to foreign governments.
Did anybody else buy Nixon's theft of Thor's line about "Take my life and let the others go"? Tricky Dick sacrificing himself? That made Mystique's impersonation a dead giveaway.
So Xavier could have used his powers to forcibly reorient Magneto and Mystique ideologically, but instead gambles the entire future of mutantkind on what might remain of "the better angels of her nature," and then allows both of them to escape, thence to perpetrate future massive crises and provoke the "inter-species" war they so much want to fight and he wants to prevent. And here I thought Charles Xavier wasn't a "big fan of violence".
But then, that's what the X-Men are all about: keeping themselves in business.
In the changed future of 2023, everybody is alive. Even Cyclops and Jean Gray...and En Sabah Nur. Which just goes to show that even if you can change the past for the better, that can still open up other cans of worms you know not of.
Sic semper sequalis.
No comments:
Post a Comment